
Class TW J 1_201 

Book_^k 

CoipglrtN . 



COPYR2GHT DEPOSIT. 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 



THE SURVIVAL OF 
THE UNFIT 



POWERS, PRINCIPLES, AND PRACTICE 
IN MAN-MAKING 



BY 

PHILIP WENDELL CRANNELL, D.D. 

President Kansas City Baptist Theological Seminary 




HODDER & STOUGHTON 

NEW YORK 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






Copyright, 1915 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



QGT25I9I5 



CI.A414240 

Hot 






Dedication 

To the one whose sympathy, faith, and works have 
been life's constant support, inspiration, and incitement, 

MY WIFE, 

this book is affectionately dedicated. 



PREFACE 

THE chapters in this volume were originally pub- 
lished as editorials in the Sunday School Times, 
to which paper, and to its accomplished editor, Charles 
Gallaudet Trumbull, grateful acknowledgment is 
hereby made. While covering a rather wide range 
of title and topic, they will be found to be expositions 
of one central theme, the development and operation 
of character under the hand of God, through the faith 
and work of the Christian, in his threefold relation- 
ship, — to God, to himself, and to his fellows. 

They are gathered here with the hope that they 
may be of help .to some who, in the midst of the 
intricate duties and difficult problems of our present- 
day life, are seeking to do justly, and to love kindness, 
and to walk humbly with their God, assured that it 
is God who worketh in them both to will and to work, 
of his good pleasure. 



CONTENTS 



" MY LORD AND I " 



CHAPTER 
I. 

II. 

III. 

IV. 



The Survival of the Unfit . 
Character by Salvation . 
Nature's Parable of Grace . 
The Weakest Link . 
V. God's Uncomfortable Comforting 
VI. God's Comfortable Comforting 
VII. Present-Day Holiness 
VIII. The Dusk of Faith . . 
IX. Rewards That Cannot Fail . 



PAGE 

13 
19 
25 
32 
38 

44 
50 
56 
62 



" HIS MAJESTY, MYSELF " 
X. The Tragedy of Individuality 
XI. The Power of Individuality . 
XII. The Triumph of Individuality 

XIII. Who Shall Give You That Which Is 

Own? 

XIV. Prerogative, Privilege, Power? 
XV. Bad Temperament as an Asset 

XVI. The Limitations of Self-Respect . 

XVII. The Saving Grace of Inconsistency 

XVIII. The Formula of Immunity . 

XIX. The Christian Duty of " Front " . 

XX. Martyrs Who Miss Their Crown 

ix 



Your 



7i 
77 
82 

86 
92 
98 
104 
no 
116 
122 
129 



CONTENTS 



" OTHERS " 
" The Need of a World of Men for Me " 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XXI. Sympathy the Proof of Spirituality . . 137 

XXII. The Touch of the Sun . . . 

XXIII. Sympathy's Golden Gains . 

XXIV. Sympathy for the Strong . 
XXV. Insidedness 

XXVI. The Grace of Graciousness 

XXVII. The Penalties of the Seat of the Scornful 

XXVIII. The Imposture of " Appeal " . . 

XXIX. The Blessings of Inertia . 



EPILOGUE— BASE AND PINNACLE 



142 
148 
153 
i59 
165 
169 

i75 
181 



XXX. Childlikeness or Childishness? . . .189 

XXXI. When the Oldest are the Youngest . .194 

XXXII. The Morning and Evening Harp . .199 



"MY LORD AND I " 



SUMMER 

What is the soul's best season, when she makes 

Her gains of girth, and grace, and glow of flowers? 

Ofttimes it falls in Fortune's tropic hours, 
And oft in grief's chill wind, that rudely shakes 
Through strife to strength ; each yields its guerdon fair. 

But airs of balm too often bring no bloom, 

And blasts austere both bole and blossom doom: 
Deeper her Summer lies than sun or air. 

Rife with rough winds, or rich with breezes bland, 
That season brings its fruitage from above, 

Scatters its graces thick on every hand, 
Wins strength from softness, bloom from bitter strife, 

When through wide open gates of faith and love 
Pours a full tide of God's transforming life ! 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

THE " survival of the fittest " is a fact as old as 
the law of cause and effect. It was proclaimed 
by our Lord when he said, " Unto everyone that hath 
shall be given; but from him that hath not, even that 
which he hath shall be taken away from him.' , Those 
individuals or species which were best adapted to their 
environment, or were capable of adaptation, lived, 
flourished, and advanced. Those which were not, or 
could not be made to be, perished. One observes the 
workings of the law everywhere, among plants and 
animals and men. 

And yet there seem to be exceptions. We some- 
times find the survival of the unfit. Some who do 
not at all seem to display the qualities that match 
their surroundings are found not only to be surviving, 
but to be magnificently successful. We hear of a 
great leader, and picture to our imagination a being 
strong, robust, confident, self-assertive. Ushered into 
his presence, we find a man weak of physique, 
stammering of tongue, mild of manner, an asthmatic 
skeleton, like William of Orange, an epileptic like 
Caesar, perhaps like Paul. The revulsion of the sur- 
prise is almost ludicrous. Yet these outward weak- 
nesses may hide a frame of steel, a heart of fire, so 
that the unfitness is only partial or apparent. 

13 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

Often the realization of unfitness is truer because 
it is by the man himself. He is intrusted by God or 
circumstance with honors and tasks and responsibili- 
ties, and he sees nothing in himself that measures up 
to them. He has to act like a man of iron; he feels 
himself to be a man of lath. He is thrust into the 
battle, sword or spear in his hand, while every fiber 
of his nature protests against it. The situation de- 
mands qualities that he knows he does not possess. 
Men insist on placing him there, and he looks with 
incredulous wonder at them. Timid, retiring, self- 
distrustful, without popular gifts, he finds himself 
pushing some aggressive enterprise, some venture of 
daring boldness, perhaps in the teeth of bitter oppo- 
sition, as if his face were indeed the flint he knows 
himself not to be. Perhaps a quiet man, a domestic 
man, a man of peace, he is forced to be a warrior, 
a world-traveler, a man of affairs. And in observing 
others we are at a loss, again and again, to under- 
stand how equipments such as theirs could be in- 
trusted with such endeavors. We could have chosen ( 
a thousand men better adapted to the situation. 
Yet strange to relate, those who seem, and feel them- 
selves, and are, so tremendously unfit, are not only . 
managing to live, but are conspicuously " making 
good." 

Is it all a travesty of the law, or at least an over- 
riding of it? Is God's world topsy-turvy, and the 
law of cause and effect sometimes operative and 
sometimes not? 

That men may for their own good know the true 
sources of power, God purposes to show mankind 

14 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

that Jehovah can save with many or with few, and 
can make the weak things of the world confound the 
mighty. Let the successful man reflect on that! 
Perhaps he is simply a modern and conspicuous in- 
stance of God's power to make a thing that is not as 
though it were. It may be very often that the Father, 
willing to show at once his power and his grace, 
chooses to let his lightnings flash through a thing of 
clay. But God is not a God of caprice, and it will 
be found, if we look far enough, that some thread of 
character, found or made by God, ran through 
the clay, and conducted the divine electricity to its 
goal. 

These cases may simply reveal to us the fact that 
God's estimate, infinitely more accurate, is also very 
different from ours. Few people are strong where 
they think they are, and very often men are not weak 
where they think they are. Two confessors were 
facing the great ordeal of martyrdom. One feared 
greatly that his courage would fail and that he would 
dishonor his Lord. The other was sure he never 
could. In the face of the flame they changed places. 
Our estimate of our own ability and fitness goes 
oftener astray, no doubt, in the direction of exaggera- 
tion, but sometimes it is the other way, and some- 
times both. Not few have been the authors who have 
scorned the " potboilers," in which their most splen- 
didly effective work was done, while they chased 
ridiculously some phantom of a " masterpiece." A 
man can often have no worse judge of his abilities 
than himself. Therefore if a man find himself, by 
no eager self-seeking of his own, in a place for which 

15 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

he feels himself inadequate, why not assume that he 
who placed him there knows his size best, and will 
not desert him in his task ? " Behold, I have made 
thee this day a fortified city, and an iron pillar, and 
brazen walls." The brass of God's making is worth 
a thousandfold the " natural " variety. 

It is plain, moreover, that in most things fitness 
is not so much a matter of equipment as of will- 
power. What we do and are depends little upon our 
equipment, much upon how we use our equipment. 
Power lies deeper than in equipment. Men do not 
see with the eye, however dull or however delicate; 
they see with the brain. They do not see even with 
the brain; they see with the mind. In the last 
analysis they do not see with the mind; they see with 
the will. The old skit at the evolutionist told a great 
story nevertheless : 

" A deer with a neck that was longer by half 
Than the rest of his family's — try not to laugh — 
By stretching and stretching became a giraffe, 
Which nobody can deny." 

We develop new organs or make the old ones over. 
The will runs new grooves through the brain, almost 
literally makes itself a brain to its own order. Fitness, 
within limits, lies not in the wit, nor in the weight, 
but in the will. Wilt thou? 

And some of us may comfort ourselves in the 
thought that simple proximity is one of the greatest 
elements of fitness. There is everything in being on 
the ground. A thing at hand is vastly better for 
God's purposes than a thing a thousand miles away. 

16 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

The man seems to a good many of us, and to himself, 
like the jawbone of an ass, or even the ass itself, cer- 
tainly no better than an ox-goad; but the Philistines 
are here, and the battle is on, — and the battle is won. 

Therefore no man need spend much time in under- 
estimating himself, or in estimating himself at all, or in 
bewailing his own weakness and looking for the thou- 
sand men who no doubt are far superior to him. All 
that is neither here nor there, since he is here and 
they are there. God knows where he is, and has put 
this upon him. Who is he that he should question? 
Let him push on, knowing that he is just the one 
man for that task, since he is the one man who is 
in it. 

And let us remember that no man radiates force; 
he simply transmits it. He is not a source; he is a 
channel. The reason why God so conspicuously uses 
the " unfit " is because they are the more willing 
channels of his force. They are the poor in spirit. 
They are not forever thrusting themselves in the way, 
and shutting him out. They " give God a chance." 
Their very sense of unfitness casts them upon God's 
strength, and removes the obstacles that hinder his 
power, — pride and self-will and self -direction. Their 
very agony of helplessness is the condition of his help. 
He found them, or made them, more willing to be 
made the channels of his grace. 

The survival of the unfit? Can there be a more 
magnificent picture of fitness than this? Behold this 
man, chosen by God rather than by himself, equipped, 
not with accomplishments and powers, but with will 
.and purpose, surrendering his own judgment, pleas- 

17 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

ure, self -estimate, at the call of need, which is the 
call of God, ready to do the thing that lies at hand, 
in touch with God and surrendered to him. Do these 
" exceptions prove the rule " ? They are the rule — 
at its highest. 



18 



II 

CHARACTER BY SALVATION 

"QALVATION by character " is an attractive 
^ phrase, and a dangerous one. It does indeed 
suggest a valuable truth of the Christian life, and of 
God's dealing with the soul. " Salvation without 
character " may never really have been taught by any 
so-called gospel teachers, but many have understood 
them to teach it, and every rightly constituted mind 
shrinks from that. Nothing can be more explicit than 
the demand of the Scriptures for a salvation that shall 
be present and practical ; not only a thing imputed, but 
a thing possessed. " Except your righteousness shall 
exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees/' 
is the Master's specification. " Holiness, without 
which no man shall see the Lord," is both an Old and 
a New Testament requirement. John declares of the 
New Jerusalem that " there shall in no wise enter into 
it anything unclean." Therefore, in so far as the 
phrase " salvation by character " insists that salvation 
is not simply outward and legal, and that, in the end 
and at the root, God's laws are not to be evaded by 
any " legal fictions," even though we call them " gos- 
pel offers," the phrase may serve a good purpose. 

But just as it reads, without careful explanation, 
" salvation by character " contains a dangerous fal- 
lacy, wrapped up in the various meanings of salvation 

19 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

and character. It is either a contradiction in terms, 
or a mocking tautology. 

" Salvation by character " is not salvation at all, in 
the gospel sense; it is evolution, development, days' 
labor, not salvation, rescue, grace. For salvation im- 
plies a saving force from without, a Saviour. The 
question of the ages is not properly, " What shall I 
do to save myself ? " but " What shall I do to be 
saved ? " If men have ever in the Scripture been 
counseled to " save yourselves from this crooked gen- 
eration," it has been by accepting the salvation offered 
through Christ. But the popular phrase makes salva- 
tion an achievement of man, not a gift of God. 

Or else the phrase is a mere truism, a mathemat- 
ical equation, which leaves you where you were be- 
fore, — a gospel with no " news " in it. Salvation by 
character? Salvation is character. The aim of all 
God's work with man is not to put him, as he is, 
into an external heaven, but to make him heavenly. 
Heaven would not be salvation if heaven did not im- 
ply holiness. Heaven is simply the environment 
appropriate to salvation when that is complete. The 
salvation for which God is working is the reproduction 
in us of the character of Jesus Christ. Salvation is 
character; character is salvation; and you have the 
meaningless and helpless tautology : " character by 
character " ! The poor soul finds that he is engaged 
in lifting himself by his bootstraps. In short, this 
formula conceals under its specious show of reasona- 
bleness an utter absence of the needed motive power. 
You are as far from your goal as ever. " Let there 
be light," and there was light. But it was God who 

20 



CHARACTER BY SALVATION 

said that. " Let there be righteousness," says the 
phrase " salvation by character," and the man who 
has come into bitterest experience of his own sin and 
helplessness exclaims, " Wretched man that I am ! 
who shall deliver me out of the body of this death ? " 
" Your rope's na lang eneugh," said a despairing 
sinner to a similar counselor. This is " salvation by 
formula." I asked for bread, and I received a syllo- 
gism; for power, and I got a phrase. 

Turn the phrase around, however, and it glows with 
meaning. It is the vital bond that unites faith and 
works. " Character by salvation ! " This places every- 
thing in its logical order. It meets all the demands 
of the moralist; it expresses the fullness of the gospel; 
it refers the power and glory of redeemed humanity 
to their true and glorious source. Is not this tautology 
also? Yes, blessed tautology, the tautology of grace, 
" salvation by salvation," a divine effect produced by 
a divine cause. 

" Character by salvation " is the root- teaching of 
Jesus : " Ye must be born from above." It is the 
teaching of Paul : " Work out [or, outwork] your 
own salvation " — there is character — " with fear and 
trembling " — how little of the thoughtless confidence 
of the ethical-culturist or of the smug complacency of 
the Pharisee, ancient or modern ! — " for it is God who 
worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good 
pleasure," — there is " salvation," the gracious mercy 
of a God whose love on Calvary " would not let us 
go," though it cost his Son, and whose love would 
not stop on Calvary, but works with us every day and 
hour in holy impulse and righteous deed. This rope 

21 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

is long enough to reach to the lowest depths of human 
sin and need, but the heights from which it comes, 
and to which it lifts us, are at the topmost summits of 
spiritual beauty as they are seen in the Son of the 
Father. 

This is a gospel, in very truth; the gladdest good 
news that could be uttered to man, for its proclama- 
tion is this : " The law of the Spirit of life in Christ 
Jesus shall make you free from the law of sin and of 
death." Into this struggling heart of yours I will put 
the power of an endless life, and then, as you strive 
to express that life, I will add strength and victory, 
and by my grace, working with and through your 
effort, you shall be changed into the same image from 
glory unto glory, until Christ shall be fully formed in 
you, and you shall be like him, for you shall see him 
even as he is. The beginning and the progress and 
the end shall be of God, the appropriation shall be by 
the threefold human channel, " faith, working, through 
love." 

There is nothing mechanical or external about this; 
it goes to the very heart of man, as it comes from the 
very heart of God. It does more than satisfy an 
ethical demand, it gives a divine assurance of the ful- 
fillment of our highest spiritual longing. It does not 
remove religion from the region of individual will 
and effort, it makes man a co-worker with God in his 
own salvation. It demands all that there is in a man, 
of manly purpose and love; but it vivifies and em- 
powers that human resolution by the purpose and will 
of God. Here is no formal transfer of righteousness 
on the accepting of a formula; it is the offer of a new 

22 



CHARACTER BY SALVATION 

relation and of the power to realize the quality and 
result of that relation in actual living. Here is not a 
thing mechanical, translation into heaven, but a thing 
spiritual, transformation into the heavenly. 

The other conception has thoroughly proved its 
utter powerlessness to lift fallen humanity out of its 
helplessness and sin, and yet it has ministered 
viciously to human pride and self-righteousness. The 
true conception gives religion its most beautiful and 
helpful aspect, by removing it from the self -centered 
and the Pharisaic into the living and spiritual and 
filial. When a man sees that, work as he may, — and 
work he must, — he has nothing that he does not re- 
ceive, that all is of grace, and gladly accepts " salva- 
tion " on those terms, he enters into real sonship; for 
in his initial act of faith and surrender, and in the 
thousand daily acts of obedience, faith, and love, he 
is receiving into himself the life and power of the 
Father. This is sonship, and nothing else is. This 
state of dependence, reception, and consequently of 
gratitude and love, is the normal state of the human 
spirit in its relation to the divine spirit. " Father, 
give me the portion of thy substance that falleth to 
me," is the everlasting cry of the prodigal who does 
not know how to be a son. " Son, thou art ever with 
me, and all that is mine is thine " is God's formula 
for sonship. Independence, in some ways, of all men, 
may be a sign of manhood, but dependence upon God 
in every way is the crown of sonship. 

In this natural atmosphere of sonship, character 
comes to its highest. Strength, purity, self-control, 
increase and deepen, as obedience and love impel to 

23 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

the doing of duty, the enduring of suffering, the 
overcoming of temptation, as becometh a son of God. 
Pride, ambition, envy, jealousy, self-seeking, die in 
that air of utter dependence where the soul longs with 
an increasing love for the things of God, and glories 
not save in the cross of Christ and the all-achieving 
grace of God, as, through all life's tests and trials, 
God's salvation works out our character. 

Nothing smaller than this can be the gospel; and 
this is the universal gospel; the gospel for the man 
in the depths, smothered and drowned in his sin, for 
whom " salvation by character " could not come in a 
million years; the gospel for the moralist, seeking to 
reach the shining goal of Christlikeness from the im- 
possible levels of his own achievement; the gospel for 
the Christian, conscious of the spaces still ahead of 
him, but pressing forward toward the mark. Not 
" salvation without character," which is absurd; nor 
"character without salvation," which is impossible; 
nor " salvation by character," which is a tautology; 
but "character by salvation," the triumph of God's 
grace in the life of man. 



24 



Ill 

NATURE'S PARABLE OF GRACE 

Does Nature Ever Forgive Broken Laws? 

I*T is commonly said that nature knows no forgive- 
-*- ness; that upon every transgression she visits her 
exact recompense of reward, and with her there is no 
remission of sins, not even by the shedding of blood. 
Huxley's comparison of natural law to a great antag- 
onist at chess, benevolent on the whole, mildly wishing 
our welfare, but holding rigidly to the laws of the 
game, and exacting his penalty for every infraction, 
would be accepted, even by most Christian thinkers, 
as a fair picture of the fact. How comes it, then, that 
when we enter into the realm of the spirit we find 
another law counteracting, if not superseding, this 
" law of sin and death " ? 

It is not so. There is no contradiction, or change, 
only a development. Professor Drummond's greatest 
intellectual service, perhaps, was in reminding us that 
we dwell in a universe, not a " multiverse," or even 
a "duiverse"; that one set of laws runs through the 
whole. The Ten Commandments are a law of love, 
and so is the Decalogue of Hygiene, and the Twelve 
Tables of (God's) Political Economy. It was no dif- 
ferent God who gave the Bible, or new God who gave 
the New Testament. To be sure, we fully perceive 

25 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

that the old law is a law of love only in the light of 
the life and death and living power of Jesus Christ. 
He brought life and immortality to light. But they 
existed before, in the heart of God, and were at work 
in the world. A thousand facts and forces were more 
or less dimly indicating them; they came out into 
clear relief when he revealed them. 

The abundant signs of the grace and forgiveness of 
God in nature might seem to be overshadowed or out- 
weighed by the countless manifestations of the stern 
rigidity, and what some would call the cold and re- 
lentless certainty, of the operation of his laws. Now 
that we have seen the glory of God in the face of 
Jesus Christ we are prepared to perceive, in his lower 
and lesser revelation of himself, gleams here and 
there of the same gracious smile, and realize that the 
great antagonist is in fact our great Partner, our great 
Protagonist indeed, intent, within limits and on con- 
ditions, upon winning our game for us, and eagerly 
seeking to prevent our errors, correct our mistakes, 
and repair our injuries. But the sweep of the epi- 
demic, the roar of the tornado, the unmanning rock 
of the earthquake, typify so strikingly the resistless 
wrath of God, while the slow onset of disease as the 
result of broken law so illustrates his rigid justice 
and causality, that we have failed to perceive the 
mighty hand of tenderness and mercy at work in and 
with and through and above all the rigidity and the 
certainty. 

" It is God. His love seems mighty, 
But is mightier than it seems." 

26 



NATURE'S PARABLE OF GRACE 

The universe is no soulless machine of law, it is the 
plastic instrument of a heart of love; not a maudlin 
love, a love that blesses " hit or miss," but a love 
that, while it profoundly respects justice, right, holi- 
ness, truth, also seeks to forgive and repair. There 
is nothing said about forgiveness, in nature; it is not 
blazoned on the sky; but what forgiveness is in the 
spiritual, repair is in the natural world. " Which 
is easier," said the Master, "to say, Thy sins are 
forgiven; or to say, Arise, and walk?" "But that 
ye may know," saith God in nature, " that there is 
forgiveness of sins, I say unto the sick of the palsy, 
Arise and walk." 

We see this play of the divine grace in God's for- 
bearance, the prophecy of his forgiveness. Nature 
is very patient. There may be awful penalties to be 
exacted when the day of grace is gone, but how long 
she holds her hand! No doubt each transgression is 
registered in the brain-cells, the nerves, and the 
tissues, and adds its snowflake or iceberg weight to 
make what shall be the avalanche that sweeps away 
the life, or the glacier that entombs it. Nevertheless 
the hour that marks the fatal point when retracing of 
steps is impossible, tarries many days. Even habit 
takes a long time to form and fasten, as if nature 
were saying, " While it is called to-day, repent." 

More wonderful still is the way God steadily keeps 
at work the preventive influences. Within and with- 
out the body, he has his servants busy to counteract 
the evil and retard the day of fate. The warfare of 
the corpuscles and the microbes repeats on the bodily 
battleground and in the earth-sphere the campaign of 

27 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

Michael and his angels against the host of evil. In 
the wholesome excitements of life, in its fresh air and 
sunshine, in the countless influences of good, moral, 
spiritual, physical, he is battling for us, that we may 
not be overcome. Evil bacteria would overrun the 
world in a week, but God's microscopic champions 
are also in the field. In every sphere it is marvelous 
to see how in one way or another the evil that you 
had expected to see dominant and exultant finds the 
world sterile before it. You cannot see God, perhaps, 
anywhere, but somehow 

"He is most at work, when most invisible/* 

Prevention, however, most clearly typifies providing 
grace; it is repair that shows forgiving grace. Ana- 
lyze his ways of working how we will, we discover 
that God is not content to let the infraction of law 
work itself out in an undeflecting mathematical 
process whose end is physical annihilation. At almost 
every stage he stands by to inject life, so to say. The 
great French surgeon had inscribed over his operating- 
room : "I wound, God heals.' ' Slash goes the 
surgeon's knife among the delicate internal organs; 
he takes a stitch or two if need be, then closes the 
incision, and leaves it. To what? If there were not 
something to leave it to, more than the clumsy hand 
of man can compass amid those delicate cells, there 
would be no help in surgery. To God, who heals! 
This vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of 
nature, the physician's and surgeon's one resource, 
is God's incarnate forgiveness; nothing short of a 
miracle, but repeated so often that we call it natural. 

28 



NATURE'S PARABLE OF GRACE 

There is no wound that this unseen living and loving 
force does not seek to close with healthy flesh, no 
disease it does not seek to cure, no pang it does not 
seek to dispel. In the emotional, and in the mental 
world, God is similarly at work, or this world would 
be a prison or a hell. No forgiveness in nature! 
Every hospital denounces it as a slander, every con- 
valescence convicts it, every sleeping chamber, where 
nightly the sweet restorer " knits up the ravell'd sleave 
of care," laughs it out of court. 

So wonderfully potent is this reparative force of 
God in nature that it is almost possible to be " born 
again," physically. It is indeed possible, and all too 
common, to sin away one's physical day of grace. 
There are damages one may inflict upon the body 
which are beyond the ordinary physical grace of God 
to remedy. Yet most marvelous cases have been 
known, where a bodily " right about face," a death to 
the old sinful way of living, a walking in dietetic and 
hygienic " newness of life," has brought tone, power, 
soundness to the tissues and added years to the life. 
The man physically might have said with the hymnist, 

"Depth of mercy, can there be 
Mercy still reserved for me ? " 

And there was. 

It is very true that the process is likely to be slow. 
The evil took long in the making; it will take long, 
but — here is another instance of God's forgiving grace 
in nature — not so long, in the mending. God is 
speedier in his healing than in his wounding. It is 
with reluctance he sees the prodigal depart into the 

29 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

far country; patiently and persistently he seeks to 
postpone the evil day among the swine; but "while 
he is a great way off/* he sees the returning son, and 
runs and falls on his neck and kisses him. It is very 
true, also, that the healing process is not always pain- 
less, that he must use counter-irritants, the knife as 
well as the balm, and that enforced rests, long im- 
prisonments, weary deprivations and exacting dis- 
ciplines must often be undergone. But these are just 
the remedies the great Healer uses in the spiritual 
realm also. He must wound if he is to make alive, 
shut up if he is to release. 

These curative forces of God, likewise, for their 
best effect, await our own intelligent, obedient, and 
thoroughgoing co-operation. In the physical world 
they are more impersonal than in the spiritual, be- 
cause physical nature itself is impersonal. They 
work on, along general lines, and one must learn how 
to take advantage of these general trends by adapting 
himself to them. For full physical effect there must 
be full physical obedience, and he who is ignorant of 
the laws of reparative hygiene will fail to get the 
completeness of God's bodily pardon. But this too 
is measurably true in the world of spirit. " First 
things first,' ' and God has already given us in the 
Scriptures spiritually what he is now teaching men 
through the slow advance of medical and other science 
in the so-called " natural " world. 

And, of course, what he is there accomplishing, so 
far, is but a faint image of his wonders in spiritual 
redemption. The healing, the " new birth " of the 
spirit, overshadows and outshines the earthly healing 

30 



NATURE'S PARABLE OF GRACE 

and regeneration of the body, but neither has yet 
reached its goal, and for himself the Christian looks 
forward to the " adoption, to wit, the redemption of 
our body," when the physical grace of God shall be 
brought to glorious perfection, and for the general 
scheme of things, he awaits that day when the whole 
creation, which groaneth and travaileth in pain to- 
gether until now, shall share in the liberty of the sons 
of God. 

Meanwhile, his heart may thrill with the thought 
that "The Lord our God, the Lord is One"; that 
what he is in spirit, that he is in nature; and that 
every day, every hour, every second, in every living 
thing, he is proclaiming that his tender mercy and 
compassion are over all his works. The laws of na- 
ture are laws of grace. Our Father's face shines 
through them all. 



3i 



IV 

THE WEAKEST LINK 

T S it true that " a chain is no stronger than its 
-*• weakest link " ? Literally, yes. As a statement of 
physics it cannot be gainsaid, if one is speaking of a 
simple chain. Strain can be resisted or pull exerted 
only along a line of cohering particles. The particles 
outside that line may be many and weighty, but for 
the purpose of pull or resistance they are nothing. 
Therefore the smallest cross-section and the weakest 
coherence represent the actual strength. Indeed, the 
fact is even stronger. The chain is weaker than its 
weakest link, for those particles which are outside 
of the continuous lines of coherence add no strength, 
but do add the pull of their useless weight, and so 
demand from the weakest link a portion of the 
strength that should be applied to the external burden. 
As a figurative statement of a fact of legal right- 
eousness it is true, " Whoever shall keep the whole 
law, and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty 
of all." If a man presents himself before God on 
a basis of his actual desert, and expects to earn salva- 
tion, he must offer an obedience and a sinlessness abso- 
lutely complete and without a flaw. He has chosen 
that method of approach to God; he is borne up by 
his own strength; he casts the bridge of his own 
righteousness over the chasm between himself and 

32 



THE WEAKEST LINK 

God. Its success depends on its completeness. The 
strength of every part is no greater than that of any 
part. When he arrives at that weak point, the bridge 
bears up just what that will bear, and no pound 
more. It breaks with him, and the strength of all 
the rest is of no avail. He has fallen short of the 
glory of God. 

As a warning against carelessness and an incitement 
to intenser struggle, the saying has high value. You 
are never safe while that weak point remains. No 
matter how strong your walls are in other quarters, 
you might almost as well not have them, for thick 
walls here keep out no enemy there. Absolute strength 
at every point is the essential of victory. The walls 
of a ship may average a foot thick, but if in many 
places they are two feet thick, and in one an eighth 
of an inch, her voyage will be short. Achilles' mighty 
sinews and mystic invulnerability cannot save him 
when once the enemy finds his unguarded heel. The 
inch-wide chink lets in the fatal shaft. All this is 
true and important. 

It is in the implications and inferences and the 
silences of the saying that its falsehood lurks. It 
tends to produce too severe judgments. It engenders 
discouragement. It is not true. In this world, where 
the divine pity and the divine helpfulness bend over 
us and beat with mighty tides against our hearts' doors, 
it is not true. In the eye of divine love, appreciation, 
and mercy, a chain is not only stronger than its weakest 
link, but it is often much stronger than its strongest 
link. For purposes of warning and for purposes of 
appraisal, where men insist on that method, God judges 

33 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

men by their weakness, but for other purposes and 
in other connections he judges them sometimes by 
their average strength, sometimes by the greatest, 
sometimes by their aggregate, and sometimes by much 
more than that. 

Christ's appraisal of Peter, for example, was 
founded, not on his denial, or his rash officiousness, 
or his frequent failure of real sympathy with the 
higher aims of the Master, but on his discerning and 
generous confession and loving earnestness, and more 
on their future promise than on their present value. 
In the very man who is so soon to deny him he sees 
the one who is capable of " strengthening the 
brethren " when he shall have " turned again." In 
his rash, impetuous, heady follower he sees " the 
rock "of steadiness. In like fashion the emphatic and 
magnificent testimony to John is called forth by the 
very questioning that showed such surprising weak- 
ness in the great forerunner. To John himself he 
transmits a gentle rebuke and warning, " Blessed is 
he whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in 
me," but to the standers-by he announces his ap- 
praisal of the man who has felt in the prison the 
tremors of doubt : " Verily I say unto you, Among 
them that are born of women there hath not arisen 
a greater than John the Baptist." In the older day, 
David is a conspicuous example of God's method. His 
appraisal is not based on his dark hours of blood and 
lust, but on his love for God's law and house, his 
longing after purity, his trust in God. In the light 
of these things he is a " man after mine own heart." 
So with Abraham, so with Jacob. God saw in these 

34 



THE WEAKEST LINK 

men something larger than they were at their smallest, 
something vastly larger than anything they actually 
were at their largest. 

The idea that for purposes of resistance or accom- 
plishment I am no stronger than my weakest link is 
a blind fallacy, for it omits a premise, — more than 
one. It is blind to the complex nature of man, the 
effect of different qualities upon each other. I am 
not a single chain. I am a congeries of chains, not 
merely parallel, but interlinked and interwoven, inter- 
twined and intertwisted. My real strength is deter- 
mined by the interplay of the weaker elements with 
the stronger, and the reverse. I am not a chain, but 
a cable, and a cable each strand of which not only 
bears its quota of the strain, but can communicate 
laterally, if one may so say, of its own strength, or 
weakness, to its fellow-strands. Tendencies counter- 
act each other. Qualities control or modify. Esti- 
mates of tensile strength that do not give due weight 
to this exceeding complexity are unworthy of con- 
sideration. When phrenology was given more credit 
than to-day, the skillful reader of " bumps " did not 
venture to announce the aptitude or character of his 
subject from the size of any one organ, but waited 
to weigh and balance and calculate resultants. De- 
structiveness might be balanced by some opposite, pas- 
sion held in check by reason or will, acquisitiveness 
by benevolence. I am not as weak as that moral 
infirmity of mine, or that evil trait. I am only as 
weak as that is, modified by love, truth, honor, faith. 
The man who surrenders to such a weakness sur- 
renders before he has reviewed his garrison. " See 

35 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

that jaw?" said one who had failed once and again 
in the struggle for right. " How can a man with a 
jaw like that ever amount to anything?" But he 
might if he had only had a head ! They used to point 
out to Socrates that, according to his own Greek no- 
tion of the identity of the good and the beautiful, 
his goggle-eyes and misshapen head betokened an evil 
soul. He acknowledged the fact, but said that his 
high thought and pure life were due to the restrain- 
ing influences of philosophy and the power of his 
" daemon." Bring up all your reinforcements, O 
struggler! Let reason, will, love, honor, send their 
forces across, in front of, through and through, that 
breach in your fortifications, and you shall conquer 
yet. 

This fallacy is blind to a greater thing. It is blind 
to the grace of God. Someone was kind enough to 
inform Chalmers that he had " the leens of a rascal." 
Like the old Greek, the great Scotchman did not deny 
the charge, but remarked that, if he had been able 
to overcome those tendencies, as he hoped he had, it 
was by the grace of God. Paul says, " When I am 
weak, then am I strong." It is as true if we change 
the adverbs, " Where I am weak, there am I strong." 
The successful assaults of Satan are not made at our 
weak places, but at points where, in fancy and in 
fact, our natural strength is greatest, and which 
therefore are left unguarded and uninforced. It was 
up the impregnable Heights of Abraham that Wolfe 
made his way to victory. It was on his strongest 
side that Moses sinned. The knowledge of a weakness 
may make that the strongest point in all our lines. 

36 



THE WEAKEST LINK 

If it means that we thrust out before that broken wall 
the strength of Jesus Christ, it means that there we 
are stronger than our strongest. " Blessed is the man 
who feareth alway." It is said that the branded 
cattle on our Western ranges " favor " the wounded 
side by lying on the other till a habit is formed. Then 
the skin on the side that has been burned, being exposed 
to wind and sun more than the other, becomes the 
thicker and firmer. Unhappy is the man who is only 
as strong as his strongest link. He will snap one 
day. Thrice blessed is he who is as strong as his 
weakest, when that is reinforced by the grace of God. 



37 



GOD'S UNCOMFORTABLE 
COMFORTING 

A CURRENT idea of comforting is that it is cos- 
setting, coddling, the giving of an anodyne. Nor 
is this wholly unfounded. So long as we live in a 
world of sin and pain and weakness, that kind of 
comfort will never be entirely unnecessary or out- 
grown. There is no virtue in pain, in itself consid- 
ered. God does care whether his children suffer, — 
" in all their affliction he was afflicted," — although 
there is one other thing for which he cares much 
more. When his will for his own is fully wrought 
out, he " shall wipe away every tear from their eyes." 
Besides, there are pains so great that the shock of 
them would kill, and so he mercifully gives an ano- 
dyne; he deadens the pain, or he takes us into the 
arms of his pitying love and croons away our dread 
and grief. 

Nevertheless, the true and permanent comforting 
is more than this. Anesthesia is but a temporary ex- 
pedient. It disguises pain, but the thing that produces 
the pain too often remains. The only permanent and 
safe relief comes from the restoration of the organs 
and tissues to their normal state. They were starved, 
or engorged, or diseased; they must be fed, renewed, 
made healthy. " Comfort," by its etymology, is 

38 



GOD'S UNCOMFORTABLE COMFORTING 

" strengthening.' ' The " Comforter " is not, of 
course, the " consoler " merely, or chiefly. He is the 
" strengthener." 

This process of bringing back the tone to depleted 
or diseased tissues is, in the nature of things, often 
painful, and especially so in the spiritual world, be- 
cause the very things concerned are mind and heart 
and will, and their consciousness is essential to any 
real effect here. A man cannot be chloroformed into 
insensibility while you take out his heart of stone, like 
a troublesome adenoid, and substitute a heart of flesh. 
In that operation, whatever our theory of God's action 
may be, in some stage or other the heart itself is in- 
tensely active. God cannot bring about in us the full 
results for which he strives without the use of pain. 
"If ye are without chastening, then are ye . . . not 
sons." 

One of God's methods of restoring health is the 
counter-irritant. There is a state of congestion. The 
cells have become engorged. In some way the blood 
must be withdrawn. A blister is applied. It sets 
up an irritation. The blood rushes to the new center 
of disturbance, away from the old; the engorged cells 
are relieved, nature resumes her normal course, pain 
is assuaged, cure comes. This is God's frequent and 
loving method in sorrow. How often the soul longs 
and hungers to indulge in the luxury of grief, to sink 
itself out of sight in the floods of anguish, to sit, 
still and stony, in the paralysis of sorrow, when sting ! 
comes the sharp lash of an unwelcome necessity, of a 
duty now at least repulsive, of responsibilities that 
are most bitter, and that at first seem but to heighten 

39 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

the pain. The touch of them is like salt on raw 
flesh; their insistence is an exquisite cruelty. No! 
Their insistence is life, it is tenderest mercy. That 
absorbing duty turns the mind away, relaxes the 
strained muscles, exercises the normal functions, and 
soon brings what thought could not, what such faith 
and prayer at least as that poor soul was capable of 
could not, the peace and rest and sanity of health. 
God has comforted by a sting. 

A cutting or puncture is another of the uncomfort- 
able comfortings of God. Diseased or perverted mat- 
ter has gathered where it sets up a continual irrita- 
tion; it is producing fierce and agonizing pain, — or, 
worse, is spreading its poison through all the streams 
of life. It must be removed, or there will be deepen- 
ing disease, even death. Puncture is not pleasant. 
Who has not walked about with an aching tooth be- 
cause he could not face the forceps? How awful the 
word "cut" sounds in a sensitive ear! Yet punc- 
ture, incision, is the only road to health. This dis- 
ease cannot be healed by absorption. Absorption 
spreads it. The cut cures it. That puncture of our 
swollen pride will save us from many a sting and 
many a raving of delirium. The wreck of that ambi- 
tion, whose unholy goal or unholy pathway would 
have meant spiritual death, has been the blessedest 
thing that has ever come to us. A young man was 
arrested in the mid-career of a life of dashing and 
showy sin by a fatal though lingering disease; later he 
shed tears of joy and gratitude for that fierce thrust 
of the lancet of his God which had saved his soul. 
Many others have done the same. More than one, 

40 



GOD'S UNCOMFORTABLE COMFORTING 

almost spoiled by wealth, has been rescued, not alone 
from anxieties and jealousies and heartburnings, but 
from spiritual ruin, by that same strenuous surgery. 
It was grievous, none could doubt; but it yielded the 
peaceable fruits of righteousness. 

God's restorative treatment is not all surgery; but 
the positive sort, on which he principally relies, is 
sometimes as painful as the other. The pain in this 
case is that of returning health and strength. The 
deadened nerves are being made sensitive, the 
paralyzed muscles are receiving power, broken bones 
are knitting; into the veins and arteries, contracted by 
disuse and disease, is flooding the tide of new life. 
The nerves quiver at the unwonted stimulus, the 
muscles rebel against the unaccustomed exercise, the 
hardened vein-walls resist the incoming currents. As 
these currents sweep through they find many things 
imbedded in the life, and these in turn, like the demon 
at the foot of the Mount of Transfiguration, resist 
with vigor, and when they have to go, go tearing. The 
man who has been frozen begs his rescuers to desist 
the tortures they are inflicting; the return of life to 
those shrunken cells is exquisitely painful, — as painful 
as the languor of oncoming unconsciousness was de- 
licious. The warfare of the Spirit against the flesh 
makes the young Christian feel sometimes as if he 
were that man whose last state was worse than the 
first. The maturer believer, awakening from some 
long lapse of torpor, or sloth, or worldliness, finds 
the working of the Spirit of life a rackingly uncom- 
fortable thing. His bones wax old — so it seems to 
him — with his roaring all the day long. In reality 

41 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

they are waxing new. It is a hard thing and a bitter 
to put forth these new or long unused volitions. But 
it is life. 

When we begin to feel this uncomfortable com- 
forting of God, plainly the wise thing is not to 
complain and shrink and rebel. The great Physician 
is at work. Nor is it well to complicate the case with 
anodyne, which is sure to hinder. The palliatives of 
self-excuse, or comparison with others, only retard 
the cure. It is an equal mistake to try to defeat pain 
by either pride or will. The only thing stoicism can 
do here is to mask the more fearful ravages of the 
malady till it issues in unconquerable anguish or utter 
paralysis. Rather, take sides with God against your- 
self. Second and amend by strengthening all the 
motions of conscience. Resolutely put forth the new 
life. Give till you feel it. Crucify the old man of 
jealousy or pride, not as the ascetic puts his muscles 
to death, by disuse, but as an athlete trains down 
his surplus flesh, by labor at their opposites. It is said 
that one found himself condemned to death by that 
fearful enemy, locomotor ataxia. But he set his will 
to conquer it. His method was exercise, and exercise 
was agony. He forced his pain-racked limbs through 
the motions of life through the days and weeks and 
months and years, and stepped forth conqueror. 
Whatever of truth there may be in this as an incident 
of bodily healing, it accurately describes a method of 
spiritual cure. Again the Lord Jesus says to the man 
with the withered hand, " Stretch forth thy hand," 
and again the man obeys. Is there pain in it, shame, 
conscience, self-denial, self-refusal? Stretch it forth. 

42 



GOD'S UNCOMFORTABLE COMFORTING 

Just now life tingles with the torture of health re- 
turning; before long it shall thrill with the rapture 
of health restored. 

The quicker we learn the lesson, the shorter the 
session with the rod. Much of our pain is unneces- 
sary, the fruit of disobedience. We do negligently 
the surgical work with which God intrusts us, and we 
leave centers of long disease. Faith and hope and 
trust would much shorten and much lighten the pangs 
of parting disease and coming health. But the cut- 
ting out of favorite sins, the breaking up of old habits 
and the forming of new, the subjection and crucifix- 
ion of " the old man," will never be a painless 
process. Some of the best comforting will always 
be uncomfortable. That door of " tribulation " 
whereby we enter the kingdom stretches across every 
path. He who accepts it fully, frankly, actively, 
passes through it most quickly, and profits by it most 
gloriously; but without it the chaff never leaves the 
wheat. 



43 



VI 

GOD'S COMFORTABLE COMFORTING 

TJAIN is not the only nor the favorite restorative 
■"■ of God. He uses it, but it would be wrong to 
infer that he uses it most of the time, or that he has 
any special fondness for it. It would seem safe to 
say that he never employs it if it can be dispensed 
with. " He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the 
children of men." In many cases the pain we feel 
is the product of causes from without, an injury from 
others' error or sin, which it is the part of God's love 
to repair. In other cases, all that is needed for a cure 
is to hold the suffering in abeyance while nature heals. 
And sometimes sunshine is the one curative required; 
that gentle warmth dispels the pain, and in its glow 
the soul outgrows its malady. 

While it is true, therefore, that " into each life 
some rain must fall," and that there are qualities of 
strength and ripeness and beauty which cannot reach 
their height without " a touch of frost," these are the 
exception, and should bear about the same proportion 
to the other as the few days of frost do to the long 
summer in the life of the fruit or the leaf. God's 
love is always seeking to reduce them to a minimum. 
His comforting is only occasionally uncomfortable; 
usually it is soothing, pleasant, stimulating, inspiring, 

44 



GOD'S COMFORTABLE COMFORTING 

and would be even more so if we were wiser in our 
attitude toward it and toward him. 

Over against the counter-irritant method, for exam- 
ple, the Father delights to use what may be called 
the counter-stimulant. In this case, the suffering is 
not that of deep inner disease, or, if its source is inner, 
it is the result of our own brooding. His remedy is 
diverted attention. If we rivet a pained and anxious 
thought upon almost any portion of the body, we can 
keep it in irritation; the pain is imaginary at first, 
perhaps, but it gets to be very real, and sometimes 
there is an actual change in the tissues, corresponding 
to the sensation, or to our ideas of it. How doubly 
true is this of the mind and the spirit, where attitude 
is nine-tenths of life! Imaginary ills! Yes! And, 
as Sir Walter Scott said of them, all the harder for 
that. 

The cure, however, is not imaginary, though it is 
mental. It consists in drawing or directing the 
thought elsewhere, — " the expulsive power of a new 
affection." A thought or a feeling which fills the mind 
cannot be summarily dismissed; it must be driven or 
drawn away. The quality of the counter-stimulus is 
not the important factor, so much as the force of it. 
A blister may do it, but why not a blessing as well? 
When the lady asked the boy if he were not cold, he 
answered, " I was, ma'am, till you smiled." We are 
cold — till God smiles. This comforting of his as- 
sumes a thousand delightful forms. He gives us some 
promise to think of, and if our love is deep and our 
faith is strong, we have soon forgotten all about our 
present distress. He imparts some joy of present love 

45 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

or service, and the little sting, or the great one, is lost 
in the outflow of thought and interest. He gives us 
some kindly touch of human love, some delight of 
nature, some of those " thoughts which do often lie 
too deep for tears," and the sorrow is gone, driven 
away by sunshine. 

" ' 111 and o'er-worked, how fare you in this scene ? ' 
' Bravely/ he said, ' for I of late have been 
Much comforted by thoughts of Christ, the living Bread ! ' " 

And the best of this method is that God has filled 
the earth full of materials for it, and has put the key 
into our hands. We can use it at any time. Often 
and often we look up to the heaven with our implor- 
ing faces. " Comfort, comfort ! " we say. " Our 
Father, give us comfort ! " And he says, " Look 
about you, my child; there it is, flooding the earth, 
tracking your pathway, filling your lives, warm, rich, 
full,— take it!" 

Instead of surgical cutting and dissection, some- 
times so necessary, God often uses without it, what he 
greatly prefers, the infusion of blood and the quick- 
ened heart-throb. There are pain-relievers which do 
their work by slowing up the heart; there are others 
which relieve by hastening and strengthening its 
action. In the increased momentum, the rush and 
flow, the little pain-obstruction, is swept away. Now 
and then he lays his hand on the fevered heart, and 
gently checks its beating, but more often he touches 
it into speed. For much of our pain arises from slow 
pulses and weak heart-throbs. It is astonishing how 
the little things can cut and hurt and rankle when our 

4 6 



GOD'S COMFORTABLE COMFORTING 

vitality is low. It is astonishing how little the cut is 
felt, and how soon it heals over, when we are in high 
health. 

11 Tis life of which our veins are scant, 
More life, and fuller, that we want." 

" Love suffereth long and is kind, ... is not pro- 
voked, . . . beareth all things, believeth all things, 
hopeth all things, endureth all things." This quick- 
ened heart-throb sometimes has its painful aspects, 
but as a rule it means delight. Disease, not health, 
brings pain; and health, welcomed, tingles with the 
joy of living. If pain appears, it is temporary; joy 
cometh in the morning. The love-cure, the joy-cure, 
the enthusiasm-cure, these delightsome ways are his 
favorite ways. 

But often in his tender grace God adds another to 
his remedies of comfort, and that is the balm of his 
personal presence. There are ailments where the 
poor heart, though it flutters wildly, is so weak that 
a narcotic, slackening its throb, would hush it into a 
quiet from which there could be no awaking, and a 
stimulant would rudely snap the slender hold on life. 
Medicine is out of the question. Then the Physician 
himself is the medicine. He comes with his calm, 
his confidence, his sympathy, his will-power, the 
magnetism of his own perfect health, and in an hour 
the pain is gone, the disquiet is over, the flutter has 
ceased, and the sufferer has sunk into the sweet slum- 
ber as of a little child. 

And God knows that our hearts have got so en- 
tangled with our miseries that we cannot get them 

47 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

loose. He knows that our heart-beats are very feeble, 
and we are very weary. He is not dealing with life- 
less machines or deathless angels, but with poor, 
weak, tired, failing men and women. And so he 
brings the throb of his great heart against ours; its 
warmth allays our fever, its calm soothes our flutter- 
ing, it puts its own strength into us, and we are whole. 
In the sweet, old-fashioned phrase which may we 
never forget, he " speaks peace to our soul." 

"But what to those who find? 

Ah this, nor tongue nor pen can show ! 
The love of Jesus, what it is, 
None but his loved ones know ! " 

But he has not put us to sleep. He has awakened 
every power to fullest exercise, he has quickened us 
into new life, he has thrilled us into the likeness of 
his own love and joy, sometimes with a rapture that 
earth seems hardly able to endure, — but there is life 
in every thrill. That is the way God comforts, the 
way he delights to comfort, if we will let him. 

In both sorts, God's uncomfortable and God's com- 
fortable comforting, the great secret is to catch his 
thought and work with him. To seize on the good 
and pleasant things that throng the world about these 
saddened hearts of ours, to catch up and build upon 
his promises, to plunge into life with quickened in- 
terest and love, to open the soul to that healing 
Presence, — these make the heart sing aloud with the 
Psalmist : 

" Bless Jehovah, O my soul, 
And all that is within me, bless his holy name; . . . 
Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; 

4 8 



GOD'S COMFORTABLE COMFORTING 

Who healeth all thy diseases; 

Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; 

Who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies; 

Who satisfieth thy desire with good things, 

So that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's ! " 

Then we go forth to comfort our fellow-men 
" through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are 
comforted of God." 



49 



VII 
PRESENT-DAY HOLINESS 

A FATHER, lately writing to his daughter on her 
eighteenth birthday, wished for her a woman- 
hood not only happy and useful, but holy. It was 
a new word for her everyday vocabulary. She had 
heard of fine women, splendid women, good women, 
but holy womanhood had an old-time sound, strange 
to her twentieth-century ears. Assuredly we are not 
hearing the word as often as our fathers did. We 
should not be very likely to speak of any Christian 
man or woman of to-day, private or public, obscure 
or eminent, admirable though he or she might be, as 
" holy." Strong, true, consecrated, noble, pure, but 
hardly holy. What does the difference portend? 

Some would say that the word has disappeared 
from our speech, because the thing has departed from 
our life. That it is a sign of the spiritual decadence 
of the time. That we are lost in worldliness, material- 
ism, sin. That the love of the many has waxed cold. 
That white purity, supreme devotion, absolute sur- 
render to God and complete absorption in the things 
of the Spirit, is not able to endure the fever of our 
sin, the chill of our indifference. That we have not 
vitality enough to desire or endure anything above a 
minimum or average religion. 

But a fair view of the religious world to-day, giving 

5° 



PRESENT-DAY HOLINESS 

due weight to both bad and good, hardly justifies this 
charge. The amount of real goodness, active charity, 
and whole-hearted devotion among Christ's people 
was never greater. Never was there a juster appre- 
hension of the length and breadth and height and 
depth of what it means to be a real Christian. Never 
were there so many earnest men and women seeking 
to do Christ's will. Probably never have so many 
been inquiring that will as found in his Word and re- 
vealed by his Spirit. 

This disuse of the word " holy," however, is not a 
mere vagary of the popular tongue whereby a term 
is temporarily dropped for no particular cause, to be 
taken up again for no better reason. It is a symptom, 
a very cheering symptom, on the one hand, and a 
symptom which points out a very grave defect and 
danger on the other. 

It indicates a wholesome change in our conception 
and practice of religion. The old use, not the full 
scriptural idea by any means, implied that religion 
was separation from the things and interests of earth. 
To be holy was to be " set apart," with most decided 
emphasis on the " apart." It meant not only differ- 
ent standards, different practices, and a different re- 
lation to God, but a different place of living. If it 
did not mean, as it never wholly did, a certain sanc- 
timoniousness, it did suggest a white aloofness, still 
contemplation, mystic communings with God, a life 
spent so exclusively in his thought and service that 
the demarcation between its course and the world's 
was clear and distinct. And, while this latter was not 
of its essence, the outer look and manner, perhaps 

5i 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

even the garb, indicated the difference. The names 
of a dozen or a hundred ancient and medieval 
" saints " occur to one. 

But that sainthood, beautiful, sweet, admirable as 
it was, is not the sainthood of Jesus Christ, of the 
tireless worker who went about doing good, who min- 
gled intimately with the nobility and the rabble in 
palace and street, and whose hands touched the bier 
of the dead, the eyes of the blind, and the rough skin 
of the leper. We no longer have the idea, and God 
grant we may never get it again, that to be nearer 
God is to be farther away from the people. The God 
we worship to-day, the God of the Scriptures, is an 
immanent God, and he can be served only by an 
immanent people, interwoven inextricably with the 
lives of the men and women they are set to serve. 

We are translating our religion into terms of daily 
life, and asking ourselves the question that a certain 
old Hebrew Christian asked his readers, " He that 
loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can 
he love God whom he hath not seen ? " We are put- 
ting over the pulpits of our churches the inscription, 
" To the Glory of God Through the Good of Man." 
And so it comes about that we are seen more in the 
hospital than in the oratory, more among the poor 
than in the temple, more in the civic and social move- 
ments than in the still cell of the mystic. And this 
is in full accord with the Master's " Inasmuch/' and 
with the prayer he gave us to answer partly our- 
selves, " Thy will be done." 

The modern religion, as we call it, — although the 
complete religion in every age has been this, — con- 

52 



PRESENT-DAY HOLINESS 

sists not in denials but in affirmations, not so much in 
abstaining from things as in employing things for the 
glory of God and using them to shape in human lives 
his image. Our question is not how few we can touch, 
but how many we can control and use. We are am- 
bitious, in our sphere and measure, to make all things 
work together for good. The Christian life, in our 
conception, is not a tall, straight, slim pillar reaching 
heavenward, and only accepting breadth, thickness, 
and weight because there is no other way on earth to 
produce a perpendicular, but it is a globe that includes 
within its perfect round every interest of life, glorified 
and ennobled by the presence of God. 

Our holiness is wholeness, full-rounded manhood 
and womanhood, from which nothing essential to 
manhood or womanhood can normally be left out. 
We realize that there are still junctures even in our 
modern life, and always will be on earth, when we 
must carry out the command, "If thy right hand 
cause thee to stumble, cut it off"; we may have to 
sacrifice or suppress some faculties of the body or 
mind to give the spirit its full chance of development. 
But we also realize that these cases are abnormal and 
ought to be exceptional, that " I came that they may 
have life, and may have it abundantly." He is the 
consummate Christian who is the complete man. And 
the real size and stage of the Christian will be meas- 
ured by the largest share of Christian motive and 
achievement he can put into the most inclusive sphere 
of healthy, happy, natural human living. He is a 
growing child in his father's house, and as he gains 
his manhood's stature, restraints fall off. 

53 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

His sainthood is not sequestered, it is eminently 
of the open, tangible, a " creature not too bright or 
good [which is impossible] for human nature's daily 
food." Hawthorne sees Phoebe Pyncheon going to 
church : " In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, 
and a holiness you could play with, and yet reverence 
it as much as ever. She was like a prayer, offered up 
in the homeliest beauty of one's mother tongue." 
The holiness you cannot play with there is something 
wrong with; it is wrung, twisted, awry. It is not 
whole, and what there is of it is not sound; it is de- 
fect and deformity, not health. It is not a holiness 
like John's in his old age, who could relax the bow- 
string of care and thought by playing with a little 
bird, or like the Master's, who could note the flowers 
in their bloom and the boys and girls in their play. 

Yet the symptom of losing the old word is not 
wholly good. We ought to have put in the new-old 
meanings; but we ought to have kept the word itself. 
The loss may show that we are a little afraid of God, 
or at least unused to go to him. We are not as well 
acquainted with him in some ways as we used to be. 
Like Martha, we are getting cumbered with much 
serving. It is possible that now and then the best 
thing we could do to please Jesus and serve men 
would be to stop working and sit at his feet a while. 
We are running very diligently and swiftly, but per- 
haps we need first to stay and hear what message he 
intrusts to us. 

It may be questioned whether the bustling minister 
or Christian worker with his finger in a dozen pies, 
diplomat, politician, reformer, sociologist, man of 

54 



PRESENT-DAY HOLINESS 

affairs, errand boy, is altogether so much more admir- 
able in God's sight than the still saint in his cell on 
his knees in mystic contemplation of his Lord. He 
certainly is not if he has not found time and strength 
in his busy life to immerse himself in the presence 
and Spirit of God, day by day. For what men need 
supremely is neither politics, civic reform, Sunday- 
schools, soup kitchens, or sociology; it is to come 
into touch with the living God. Our very service will 
otherwise degenerate into a new Pharisaism, more 
hopeless in its smug self-satisfaction, and inner dead- 
ness, than the old. And the fountains of all this 
beneficence to man will dry up unless they are fed 
from the deep sources of the life of God, which never 
yet found their way into human hearts except through 
channels dug deep by prayer and aspiration and pas- 
sionate seeking after God. We want that word back 
in our vocabulary, filled with the modern meanings, 
but not missing the old high sweetness. It is God's 
word, and we must not lose it. Out-of-date holiness 
is out of date, of course; but with all our philanthropy, 
reform, beneficence, practicality, we need a pro- 
founder life, hid with Christ in God, speaking forth 
on the housetops what it has heard in the closet, su- 
preme consecration, deepest communion, translated 
into whole, hearty human living, the living, working 
holiness of Jesus Christ. 



55 



VIII 
THE DUSK OF FAITH 

TS there one of us who has not sometimes felt, and 
-"■ wondered at, the teasing uncertainty of life? The 
outlines of things seem so misty, where we so much 
desire and need distinctness and clearness. Life's 
verdicts are so often " Scotch verdicts " : not quite 
" Guilty/' not quite " Innocent," but " Not Proven." 
Why were not the things we most need to know made 
absolutely unmistakable? It would surely have been 
ever so much more satisfactory if the Father had 
blazoned his existence on the sky so that none could 
doubt. Why must we have our long debates as to 
whether a man can be a Christian and prosper in our 
modern world of business? And why are questions 
of duty left so intricate? It may be that "duties 
never conflict," but why do they so often have to be 
balanced ? We seem to be walking in a twilight zone, 
a tantalizing dusk. 

But a world in which every truth was so absolutely 
demonstrated that it could not be gainsaid, where the 
pathway was so clearly marked out by precept, and 
infractions were punished so promptly by clear conse- 
quences that there were no real choice for right's sake 
alone, but a man was simply forced into one road, 
would not be a moral world. Huxley thought that if 
the chance were given him of being so made that he 

56 



THE DUSK OF FAITH 

would inevitably think and say and do just the right 
thing he would gladly accept. But with all his spiritual 
deficiencies, Huxley was just the sort of man who 
would draw back from such a proposal. It would 
make him a mere automaton, who does not do the 
right at all, but only the mechanical. For right im- 
plies choice. 

The chief need and advantage, however, of the 
twilight zone of uncertainty is that it affords the op- 
portunity and makes the demand for faith. Faith is 
man's ideal relation to God, the atmosphere in which 
the spirit makes its girth and grows its flowers and 
fruit. It is in the twilight zone alone that faith can 
grow and be nurtured; for the fruit of the noonday is 
knowledge, not faith. 

Faith is " trustful reliance on God." It is accept- 
ance of God's word, where that word has to be trusted 
simply because it is God's word, not because we can 
see under and over and through it and beyond it, and 
mathematically prove its truth. Faith is reliance 
upon the teachings and promises of God when their 
fulfillment does not yet appear. It is reliance to the 
point of absolute surrender and obedience, although 
the way is dark and the foes are frightful. More 
than that, it is the response of the heart of a son to 
the heart of a father. Sonship is thinking God's 
thoughts because he thinks them, doing God's will 
because it is his will, and recognizing the Father day 
by day, not by virtue of the outward show of things, 
but by inward vision. 

Here is the need and the profit of the twilight zone. 
It gives the opportunity to show and develop our per- 

57 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

ception of God. " We know that if he is manifested 
we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as 
he is," and we get royal practice in discerning his 
face now amid the dubious things of earth. " Blessed 
art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah." Blessed are we when 
increasingly we can read his message and hear his 
will, and see his face, in sky and sea and circum- 
stance, in joy and sorrow, in his written Word and in 
the face of Jesus. 

The dusk is our opportunity to make the supreme 
choice of him, of eternal right in him, just when at 
the present it is uncertain to our apprehension whether 
right does pay, just when there seems a question, after 
all, whether — 

" Behind the dim unknown 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." 

This was Job's opportunity, when his soul rocked and 
swayed before the blasts of Providence, his friends' 
unjust accusations and inadequate consoling, and his 
own perplexity and uncertainty, and he defied all the 
arguments of his friends, all the bitterness of his own 
soul, all the apparent injustices of God, in his supreme 
confidence that God would right him, his supreme 
trust, above all appearances, in that infinite justice. 
" Where are you going, my good woman, with that 
torch and that pail of water? " " I am going to burn 
up heaven and put out hell that henceforth men may 
serve God for himself alone." Can it be that God 
himself lets the glories of heaven grow less luminous 
and the gleams of hell less lurid, that men may choose 
him supremely, whether or no hell awaits rejection 
and heaven awaits choice ? 

58 



THE DUSK OF FAITH 

And so we have our magnificent opening for that 
venture by which alone faith grows sturdy. Faith 
without exercise is a feeble thing. Faith that is ven- 
ture cannot be exercised where there is no chance to 
venture. The element of reliance, not in this case on 
the idle caprice of so-called chance, but on the power 
and love and faithfulness of the Almighty God of 
promise, would be absent where every path was 
marked out, where every appearance was favorable, 
where success at once began to mature. 

The dusk, again, furnishes us a perfect gymnasium 
for the exercise of that complete oneness in thought 
and will and purpose which puts the details of the un- 
known into the Loved One's hands, accepts and builds 
upon his statements as to the facts our knowledge 
never could attain, and acquiesces in his silence as to 
the things we are not yet to know. Surely, there can 
be few sights more lovely and more touching in the 
eyes of the great Father than this implicit confidence, 
and surely also there can be but one thing that can 
give to the soul more growth into sweetness, strength, 
and oneness with the Father than such trust. " He 
will care for the unknown future. He knows the un- 
known connections of things. He will work out the 
details. I have only to trust and obey.'' Reverently 
may we say it; not the full glories of heaven can pro- 
duce the richest blooms upon this flower. It grows 
only in the twilight zone of earth. 

Nor is this the richest flower, quite. The twilight 
zone gives us our opportunity to get nearest to our 
Elder Brother. We may not say what is the fullness 
of heaven's companionship with him. It were folly 

59 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

to compare. But is it too much to say that the rich- 
ness of heaven's companionship depends upon and 
can be approached only through this? It is given us 
that we may become acquainted with him. In these 
shadows we come to know him. To such faith as this 
he responds. In the dusk of the morning he stands on 
the shore — " Children, have ye aught to eat? " And 
John whispers, " It is the Lord." Each perplexity 
draws us to him. Each disappointment makes us lean 
on the undisappointing One. We turn from the un- 
certainties to his certitude. As, again and again, rea- 
son and knowledge fail to reveal the outlines of the 
objects at which we look, the path we should travel, 
we put our hands in his for guidance. We would not 
change the lessons we learn, and the sweetness of his 
presence in these twilight hours with him, for all the 
glare of the hard noontide of any mere intellectual 
knowledge that could be given us. Many things we 
do not know, but we know him. 

"So I go on not knowing, — I would not if I might; 
I would rather walk in the dark with God than go alone in the 
light." 

But it is not the dark. Faith's twilight is morning's 
dusk, not evening's. In this blessed exercise with 
him faith brightens toward the noontide, as the dawn- 
ing light that shineth more and more unto the perfect 
day. " He that f olloweth me shall not walk in the 
darkness, but shall have the light of life." Walk 
with Jesus, and doubts of immortality disappear, for 
he on whose breast we lean, — is he not he who was 
dead, and behold, he is alive forevermore? And do 

60 



THE DUSK OF FAITH 

we not feel in him the power of an endless life? To 
the living faith God's existence is blazoned on the 
heavens; it is read in star and flower; but that scroll 
may be, and shall be, blotted out. He has written it 
on that which shall never die, the deathless heart of 
the redeemed. " He that hath seen me hath seen 
the Father. ,, Nor shall any doubt the triumph of 
right, as he looks into the face of the strong Son of 
God who says, " Be of good cheer; I have overcome." 
And this noontide of Christian faith is never reached 
at once. The earth, and the soul, rolls into glory 
through the dusk. 



61 



IX 
REWARDS THAT CANNOT FAIL 

REWARDS are of two kinds; those that may come, 
and those that are sure to come. Certain results, 
for example, usually follow our fidelity, toil, devotion. 
They form a large share of the delight of service, 
God's gracious earnest of completer things, the re- 
freshing lesser fountains of strength along the way. 
But frequently these do not appear for long stretches 
at a time, and when they do appear, they may be sadly 
mingled and imperfect. He who would find his chief 
satisfaction and support in them must confess their 
frequent inadequacy. They fail him when he most 
needs them, — he would say, when he most deserves 
them. They are absent when they are most expected. 
Human gratitude is a delightful recompense for 
loving service. But the very best and truest work 
may not procure it. Just that kind of work sometimes 
effectually prevents it. "Where are the nine?" is 
the disillusionizing question, now and then, of every 
benefactor. And without cynicism, the stream of 
gratitude is quite often badly mixed; in its sincerest 
thanks there is apt to be a strain of selfishness, if not 
of calculation and a " lively sense of favors yet to 
come." He would be foolish who insisted upon an 
accurate analysis of each draught of gratitude, — or 
depended upon it for his sole reward. 

62 



REWARDS THAT CANNOT FAIL 

From some points of view the satisfaction of suc- 
cess may be held to be a higher sort of reward; but 
an immense amount of good and faithful work is sure 
not to attain it. If " of fifty seeds, nature brings 
but one to bear," no man need be surprised if his 
best endeavor occasionally fails to reach the goal, or 
if, when he reaches it, he finds that it is not the clear- 
cut, unmingled good that he expected. 

The sense that, whether successful or not, you are 
doing good work, is very sustaining, until you catch 
a vision of the work that is being done by others, or 
that might be done by you; and you grow sick and 
disheartened at your greatest successes. The heartiest 
words of praise are hollow in your ears, almost mock- 
ery, as the heights of possibility loom up before you; 
and this feeling is likely to deepen and grow more in- 
tense as you advance in skill, power, and perception. 
Yet no one would care to be swept out of it into the 
comfortable delusion, now and then to be seen, of 
amiable and blear-eyed satisfaction with our work. 
Discontent is often the divine reward of really good 
work. 

Well, then, there is the feeling that you have done 
your best. Gratitude has missed you, success has 
eluded you, your work falls short of your own ideal; 
but, come what may, you have the consciousness that 
you have put forth the last atom of your strength, 
strained the last muscle, employed your supremest 
power. But have you? Is there not a paralyzing 
sense that you have not measured up even to your 
own possibilities ? More than once you have " stayed 
for the other pin," failed to " go the second mile," 

63 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

" offered a sacrifice with leaven." Others may say, 
" Well done," but your own heart must exclaim, 
" Alas, alas, unprofitable servant." 

We must not let analysis entirely rob these very 
real and very precious rewards of the genuine sweet- 
ness that is in them, but we must not be surprised 
when they fail in whole or in part. What, then, are 
the unfailing rewards, the joys " no one taketh from 
you " ? For there are rewards and satisfactions which 
are not of this doubtful and inadequate sort. They 
are absolutely certain. God would cease to be God 
if they could fail. 

God's unswerving rewards are, as a rule, facts 
rather than feelings, though the feelings often accom- 
pany, in proportion as we realize the facts. But a 
feeling is superficial, evanescent, an incident, never to 
be sought for in itself; the fact is the thing. 

There is the fact, then, unshakable, enduring, that 
in this act of faithful loving service I am a co-worker 
with the great God. Imperfect, with mingled mo- 
tives, erring in heart and judgment, falling short of my 
own ideals? All that. But, for all that, his fellow- 
worker, not only by my choice, but by his. What is 
good in my work is built into his work, a part of the 
glorious structure that his grace, love, power is erect- 
ing; and it catches some gleams of the glory of his 
achievement. 

Accordingly my work has its element of real and 
enduring value. It did seem to me that the human 
smile it won was on the surface, and died away in an 
instant. Like the vast bulk of all human labor it was 
necessarily concerned with the task or need of the 

6 4 



REWARDS THAT CANNOT FAIL 

moment, sped away like the wavelet of the sea, and 
the place thereof knew it no more. But God has 
built it imperishably into that eternal structure of 
righteousness, truth, and love. More than that, he 
has not only used it for some good, he has used it for 
the very best for which it could be used. We are 
prone to feel that our work did not find the right 
place. Our good missed fire. Not with God. There 
it has found in appreciation its full weight, in ef- 
fectiveness its full value. 

But this is less than the whole story. God has 
used it to better results than we could have expected, 
or even dreamed. " For brass I will bring gold, and 
for iron I will bring silver." No little investor in a 
great and vastly successful company could ever have 
the happy satisfaction that may come to every worker 
with Christ as he realizes what God can, and there- 
fore unfailingly does, make out of the poor little 
venture of labor or talent or heart-throbs we intrusted 
to the trading ships of God. Like the scraps of tin 
and iron that miners learned how to use to catch the 
gold in the sluices, these he covers with his gold. 
One would think we would all be misers of oppor- 
tunity, as we sought to save every scrap for invest- 
ment, " buying up the opportunity because the days 
are evil," and waiting with eager expectation to see 
to what marvelous uses God would put that word, that 
act, that smile, that drudgery. Shall not one of the 
keenest joys of heaven be the delighted contemplation 
of God's unfolding marvels brought to pass through 
our work? 

The fact, not indeed that it has been successful, or 

65 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

appreciated, or thoroughly up to some standard, but 
that it has left in us its remainders of power, of firm- 
ness and girth of moral and spiritual muscle, is another 
reward that can in no way fail. " Into whatsoever 
house ye shall enter, first say, Peace be to this house. 
And if a son of peace be there, your peace shall rest 
upon him: but if not, it shall turn to you again.' , 
Received, it blesses you in blessing others; rejected, 
it blesses you in the very effort to bless. It returns, 
but richer than it went. There was the joy of service, 
there is the joy of being a better servant forever 
through the service. It may not seem to be registered 
in men's memories, it makes little show of being regis- 
tered in other men's lives; but it is registered in yours, 
and in the very substance of your soul. Not one 
faintest, smallest, genuine effort ever failed of that. 

And registered in an infinitely better repository. 
Here is a sweeter, dearer, more thrilling reward than 
any of these others. This is a fact, and a feeling, too, 
not a fact and a feeling in us, but a fact and a feeling 
in him. The good in that act of ours awakened a 
thrill in the heart of Jesus. His love did not fail to 
discern the imperfection, — for amendment, not for 
criticism, — but for remembrance it passed that by, 
and seized upon the grain of gold, or of stuff that he 
could turn to gold. To bring a thrill of pleasure to 
Jesus Christ: has earth or heaven a higher joy? How 
that hour must have lingered in Peter's memory when 
Jesus' eyes kindled and glowed as he said, " Blessed 
art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah : for flesh and blood hath 
not revealed it unto thee." Wordsworth could say of 
Duty, and our hearts answer to the saying, " Nor 

66 



REWARDS THAT CANNOT FAIL 

know we anything so fair as is the smile upon thy 
face"; but here is duty, love, grace, personalized in 
our Friend of friends, our Elder Brother. No instru- 
ment of precision that man can contrive or conceive 
can compare with the eager sensitiveness of that loving 
Heart to all good in us. Not the smallest trace shall 
pass unnoticed and unfelt. Our feeling of it we may 
miss, but his feeling cannot be missed; it is laid up 
for us in that securest of all treasuries — his heart. 



6 7 



HIS MAJESTY, MYSELF" 



69 



X 
THE TRAGEDY OF INDIVIDUALITY 

f\NE of the most tragic facts of human life is the 
^-^ chasm which seems to separate souls from each 
other and from God. We meet the great events of 
life alone, — its sorrows, its joys, its crises. " The 
heart knoweth its own bitterness; and a stranger doth 
not intermeddle with its joy." In our extremity, we 
look across the chasm to those who are near and dear, 
but to our despair it seems that they cannot help. 
They can only look and long. 

And we who would help others find ourselves baf- 
fled by the same barrier, the same impassable gulf. 
That young life, so sadly making shipwreck of itself 
through ignorance, or obstinacy, or rashness, or weak- 
ness, — how we long to communicate something of our 
knowledge, of our purpose, of our love, of our 
strength, but it will not let us. Its ignorance, its self- 
will, its blindness, form a wall that shuts us out. Or 
that brave soul, working out in conscious loneliness 
some great problem of human life, that soul in some 
Gethsemane or on some Calvary of trial or sorrow 
almost unbearable, — how our love and longing and 
hope and will seek to leap across to him! But he 
struggles on, unknowing, uncomprehending. He 
treads the winepress alone. What mother, wife, 
friend, has not felt this awful separation ? 

71 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

Yet this tragedy of isolation is not all the tragedy 
it seems. In so far as the chasm is really impassable, 
it is a necessary part of individuality; it is what con- 
stitutes the man a person. Deep within the soul must 
sit the individual will, its own arbiter, its own master. 
There must be ultimately — as far as man is concerned, 
and, some would say, even as far as God is con- 
cerned — the power of veto over all motions from 
without. If it were not so, man would be simply an 
automaton, a leaf borne on the bosom of the strongest 
breeze. Individuality could not be. This tragedy, 
then, is simply the tragedy of all existence. 

But the chasm is exaggerated. It is neither as great 
nor as impassable as we think it. We are mistaken 
as to the facts. 

Consider the gulf surrounding ourselves. It is 
chiefly imaginary, or of our own making. We are like 
the Frenchman, whose knowledge of English auxiliary 
verbs was no better than that of some Americans: 
" No one shall help me; I will drown." 

It is true that the supreme decision must be made 
by my own will, that my own muscles must carry the 
burden; but my fellow-men are not so far away as I 
think. Love is seeking to cross that chasm, sympathy 
is on its way, imagination has already crossed. 
There is strength in that hand-pressure, there is 
inspiration in that look of love. Souls can touch 
at any distance. I am understood; I am appre- 
ciated. There are seven thousand who have not 
bowed the knee to Baal. Men are not the aliens they 
seem. 

72 



THE TRAGEDY OF INDIVIDUALITY 

" No one is so accursed by fate, 
No one so utterly desolate, 
But some heart, though unknown, 
Responds unto his own." 

There is in the heart of the humanity that pulses 
so feverishly around us a throb that beats with ours. 
Human sympathy is revealing itself continually, at 
the briefest notice and in the most unlikely places. 
Let a little child lose its way, let any human life be 
endangered, let there be an instance of evident and 
poignant distress in the midst of our most crowded 
thoroughfare, and the hurrying throng, a moment 
before blindly intent upon its own concerns, gives 
instant evidence that the human heart is one. If I 
fail, therefore, to get real help from my fellow-men 
across my chasm, it is because I will not believe in 
its existence and power. It is there. I have only to 
reckon on it, and it comes. In the person of his 
followers, as well as of Christ himself, the beautiful 
words of Whittier are beautifully true : 

" But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
A present friend is he, 
And faith has still its Olivet, 
And love its Galilee. 

"The healing of his seamless dress 
Is by our beds of pain. 
We touch him in life's throng and press, 
And we are whole again." 

I am lonely only in my thought, unsuccored only in my 
unbelief. 

More tragic and more real is the other chasm, that 

73 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

which surrounds the soul we would help. It is more 
nearly impassable because, in the case of ourselves, 
we guard the drawbridge of our individuality, and it 
is in our power, hard though it be, to let that draw- 
bridge down; we are on the inside. But in the other 
case we are on the outside. That independent will 
of the other man is in command. 

Yet the matter is by no means hopeless. The 
chasm can be crossed; in countless instances it has 
been crossed. If it is not crossed, it is usually be- 
cause we have somehow failed in love, or ingenuity, 
or persistency. 

God's purposes sometimes ripen fast, unfolding 
every hour; and sometimes the bloom is as the cen- 
tury plant, long delayed, but glorious when it comes. 
It is inspiring to see the array of forces at our com- 
mand. Imagination, touched by love, will transport 
us over into the heart of that fortress, and enable us 
to spy out its plan and mark its strong and its weak 
places. Love, enlightened by imagination and directed 
by judgment, will surround it with an atmosphere, 
with a throbbing warmth, that will penetrate the close- 
built walls and melt down the fences of icy reserve. 
Life, our own Spirit-filled life, will rearrange the par- 
ticles of that separated soul till they leap to the barrier, 
in response. Better than anything else, from the 
heavens above or from depths beneath will fall, or 
spring up, the quickening power of God. The walls 
still stand? The gulf is still unbridged? Have we 
been thoughtful enough in our adaptation of means to 
ends ? Has our love been warm enough, or expressive 
enough? Have we ourselves had enough of the 

74 



THE TRAGEDY OF INDIVIDUALITY 

vitality of the children of God, pushing itself over 
into this other life? Have we been enlisting, by 
prayer and faith, the power of God? And above all, 
have we been persistent enough ? 

It may be the " first step that costs "; but for the 
lack of the last step, the whole journey is in vain. 
We turn away too soon. The life might have been 
brought back to that body rescued from the sea, if 
they had kept on five minutes more. " O love that 
will not let me go," is the human as well as the divine 
love, for they are one. Tact is needed, of course, and 
ingenuity, but with them the determination that will 
not give up till success comes, or all possible hope is 
gone. Edison on the trail of a new invention is a 
model for every Christian worker. Somewhere in the 
realm of nature is that substance which shall form 
the filament of that incandescent light. Where it is, 
he does not know, but he purposes to ransack the 
whole world, " until he find it." Somewhere, ideally, 
is that combination of mechanical or chemical ele- 
ments which means a cheap storage battery; and he 
will make ten thousand experiments, until he gets 
it. Somewhere, says the heart of Christ's servant, 
in the range of powers human and divine, is the force, 
or combination of forces, which will reach this sev- 
ered soul; and with the blessing of God, it must and 
shall be found. 

Is there at the end one chasm that cannot be crossed, 
a citadel into which even God cannot or will not force 
his way, before which even he must say, " How often 
would I . . . and ye would not " ? That is a mys- 
tery of individuality, sovereignty, and love, too deep 

75 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

for us to enter now. The sorrow of Jesus over Jeru- 
salem would seem to answer to a real fact in the 
history of some souls. 

But we, whose own lives have been touched by the 
grace of God, can be very sure of this, that few are 
the hearts which loving ingenuity and unfaltering 
persistency will not sooner or later reach. Great is 
the power of prayer, and greater still the power of 
him who inspires and answers prayer. Not until the 
last of earth, assuredly, are we called upon to give up 
for any soul the hope that the tragedy of individual- 
ity may be changed by the power of love, divine and 
human, into its glory, and the man take his place, no 
longer in the awful isolation of sin, but as one of the 
family of the first-born, a son who at last has found 
his Father and his brethren, and, for the first time, 
himself. 



7 6 



XI 

THE POWER OF INDIVIDUALITY 

'T^HAT which makes the tragedy of individuality 
•** is also the condition of its power. This sep- 
arateness, this difference, which in our lonelier and 
weaker moments seems to us a prison, is in reality 
our citadel, securing our liberty and our independence. 
What appears a mountain peak of isolation is a point 
of vantage; it is the location of a battery; it is even 
the battery itself, whereby we may reach and accom- 
plish what would be impossible otherwise. 

Individuality furnishes, for instance, the means of 
arousal and attraction, through which we find entrance 
into the lives and hearts of our fellows. It is true 
that our likenesses constitute the strongest underlying 
force in drawing us together; but difference, like the 
jar which solidifies the still liquid just at the freezing 
point, is the fillip that is needed to set at work this 
mighty cohesive force. The herd raises its head to 
see the unfamiliar object, which, if it be not too 
strange, may then draw near. Men and women prick 
up their ears at sound of the unwonted voice, and 
delight to behold the new features. The face may be 
no better, the voice may be worse, but it is different, 
and hence attention, attraction, perhaps affection. 

So individuality furnishes what may be called the 
chemical reaction of lives, their power to influence. 

77 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

There is no chemistry in a homogeneous substance. 
Two metals are necessary to set up the galvanic cur- 
rent. There must be resistance, or distance, if you 
are to have either the arc or the incandescent light. 
It is the endless variety of humanity that makes this 
a world of delight and power. This it is that moves 
the dynamos which thrill and enliven life, that sets 
up the innumerable currents through which God is 
working out the progress of the race. A world of 
sameness is a world of death. Let us have no regret 
that we are distant and different from our fellows; it 
is the Archimedean standing ground from which we 
may move the world. 

But the greatest value of individuality lies in the 
fact that it may constitute the channel through which 
God reveals and expresses himself. Man first comes 
to real and lasting power when God acts on him and 
through him, and God's power and nature get them- 
selves expressed most effectively through human life. 
Only one Human Life has ever perfectly expressed 
him. It was the life of that marvelously varied single 
character which impelled some to call him Elijah, and 
some Jeremiah; which caused some to say that he 
had a demon, and some that he was a gluttonous man 
and a winebibber, — for he gathered up all, and more 
than all, the broken gleams which had appeared in the 
servants of God before him, into one perfect whole, 
so complete that he could say without a blush and 
without fear of contradiction, " He that hath seen me 
hath seen the Father." Now that he has taken his 
place at the center of things, that concentrated glory 
must reach the world through the lives of the men in 

78 



THE POWER OF INDIVIDUALITY 

whom he lives, and in them we are to see, however 
partially, his character and power, and through them 
he is " to make the worlds." 

To get the word of God revealed, and the will of 
God performed, to " make known through the church 
the manifold wisdom of God," requires men and 
women of every type and sort conceivable. His 
goodness, and power, and grace are reflected from us 
and through us as from innumerable facets, each at a 
different angle, and all together hinting rather than 
revealing the " more excellent glory." The imagina- 
tive, the prosaic, the stoical, the emotional, the strong, 
the weak, the man who never seems to have a strug- 
gle, the man who is as sensitive as a mimosa, or as 
yielding as a willow, each one of these is needed to 
reveal the character, or the mercy, or the goodness of 
God, as no other being in the universe can do it. " It 
was the good pleasure of God ... to reveal his Son 
in me," exclaims the apostle; and each one of us may 
echo in his own person the other adoring words, " For 
this cause I obtained mercy, that in me as chief might 
Jesus Christ show forth all his longsufTering for an 
ensample." Some of us who have been inclined to 
bewail and deplore the individuality which we have 
discovered to be ours, in light of this fact may be able 
to thank him that it was his good pleasure to create 
us thus and not otherwise, that even as we are we 
might exhibit what he can do to and through such as 
we, content to be even the broken glass if only we 
reflect the glory of his love. And to do this is after 
all the one purpose of our existence, the chief element 
of our power. 

79 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

Here, too, we find how this power may be realized. 
Too frequently we have thought that it was by the 
assertion of self-will and the emphasizing differences. 
It lies rather in the assertion of the will of God and 
a due combination of likeness and unlikeness; just 
enough nearness for influence, just enough distance 
for power. If the poles of the electric machine are 
touching there is no spark; but it is just as true, and 
more to the purpose, that neither is there any spark 
if the poles are too far apart. Many a man takes 
his individuality and runs off into a corner with it. 
Strange things happen to it there. Removed from the 
corrective influence of these other contacts, it branches 
out into all sorts of monstrosities. But, whatever else, 
one thing invariably happens; he robs himself of 
power. 

All that any man needs, to be as individual as he 
pleases, is to push his development out in the same 
directions as the rest of men. No man need try to 
jump his species in order to be original; the result is 
always failure and caricature. The consummate 
genius of Shakespeare, for example, is nothing but the 
insight and imagination which exist in some measure 
in every man, thrust out, to be sure, to the farthest 
boundaries yet reached, but entirely human in its 
heights and in its depths. In that fact is no lessening 
of individuality, but instead the unveiling of its power. 
Eccentricity is a poor counterfeit of individuality. If 
anger is a brief insanity, eccentricity is a partial mad- 
ness, a breaking of relationship with the normal and 
the sane. As certainly as man was made in the image 
of God, the composite picture of humanity discovered 

80 



THE POWER OF INDIVIDUALITY 

in the men and women around us, and crowned and 
corrected by the face of Jesus Christ in the Scriptures, 
is the model for all growth and the index to all power. 
Unlikeness in likeness is the secret of influence. 
To be yourself, your best and truest, to the very finger 
tips, and with it to have beating at your heart the red 
tides of the common human life, and the deeper tide 
of the life of God, in which all life is one, herein is 
the power of individuality. 



81 



XII 
THE TRIUMPH OF INDIVIDUALITY 

WHAT is the glory of individuality ? " Assertion 
and aggression,'' answers one. " Self-develop- 
ment," replies another. Each starts out in life with 
the deliberate intention to make everything he meets 
yield him culture, enrichment, or strength. In itself 
that course fails to make the man a positive center of 
outgoing force. Its symbol is the sponge, and not the 
fountain. It works its own revenges, for the self he 
becomes is not the highest self he could have been. 
Individuality's true glory does indeed consist! in mak- 
ing the most of one's self, but not the most for one's 
self. 

It is the glory of individuality to fine} and make 
real the divine ideal for the God-given life I call " my- 
self." A little girl was asked if she would not like 
to be her big sister. " Why ! " she exclaimed in sur- 
prise, " God made me, me ! " She was an individual, 
and she knew it. But too many of us easily accept 
the " me " that we are to-day as if that were what 
God meant. " This temper, this sluggishness, this 
jealousy, — oh, I was made so. It is just my way!" 
As if an heir to an estate should insist that because 
he finds there swampy lowland, barren hillside, thickets 
of thorn, he must, like the Chinaman with the patches, 
religiously preserve them. They are there, but not 

82 



THE TRIUMPH OF INDIVIDUALITY 

in the final purpose. The design sees in that swamp 
the most fertile spot upon the farm; it sees the thicket 
of thorns replaced by a copse of firs, and the bare 
height crowned with a temple of the living God. 
Happy is the man who sees himself with unsparing 
eye, undeceived by his favorite weaknesses or pleasing 
sins, never mistaking blemishes for beauties, and, un- 
deterred by the difficulties of the task, sets himself to 
work to gain strength, to cut out evils, to present him- 
self to God, not the man he was, but the man God 
planned in him. 

How to hold to what we have in common with 
others, and yet rightly develop what is our own, how 
to be universal and yet individual, is one of the great 
life problems and a great glory of individuality. 
Oddity is easy enough. But it is artificial and repul- 
sive. And " the best things any mortal has are those 
which every mortal shares." The path to this vic- 
tory, though not always easy, is plain. One has only 
to cherish the natural instincts which lead him into 
the society of his fellows, simply to let the human 
life and love that is in him work freely out, be much 
with men, and alert to hear what God through his 
countless human messengers would say to him alone. 
The ever active power of assimilation and unconscious 
imitation will furnish him the universal element, and 
his individual communion with God will give his 
voice a characteristic ring his fellow-men will prick up 
their ears to hear. 

Greater, if possible, is the glory when individuality 
succeeds in fitting itself without friction into the gen- 
eral scheme of things, and that as an active power of 

83 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

blessing and help. For this is the purpose of it. 
" The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but 
to minister, and to give . . ." Every single moral 
and physical entity in this world is here for a positive 
purpose. In God's design there are no negations. 
What we call dead matter, the scientists tell us, is 
simply a knot of living force. There is no glory in 
being a mere recipient. Past and present may ascribe 
greatness to the world's takers of toll, but " with you," 
as with God, " it shall not be so, but he that is great 
among you, let him be your servant." The getting 
life, the hindering life, are condemned lives. Measure 
your individuality, not by the tribute you have taken, 
not by your blockade of others, not by your dwarfing 
and crippling and overriding; measure it by your for- 
getting of self in the desire to help and bless; by the 
way in which " all that is in you," without a thought 
of your own dignity or ease or greatness, has " for 
the truth's sake gone abroad "; by the souls you have 
thrilled into life and strengthened for victory; by the 
impulse you have given to the general movement for- 
ward into light. The mountain spring has lost itself; 
you trace it in the richer grass of the hillside. He 
who loses his life in such fashion gains it unto the 
life eternal. With every gush of sacrifice the heart 
grows richer; with every push of moral and spiritual 
muscle to help another our own grow sturdier; with 
every outgo of self -forgetting energy we become a 
more potent force. These are not the individualities 
that shrivel into caricature and die away into paralysis. 
They grow into the stature of the sons of God. 

And the crowning triumph of individuality is in its 

8 4 



THE TRIUMPH OF INDIVIDUALITY 

complete yielding to God, when in obedience and love 
it makes its one endeavor the doing of his will. If 
any man wishes a triumphant individuality, his path 
is plain. Let him follow Jesus Christ in his utter and 
active obedience to the Father. He is the most indi- 
vidual of the sons of men, individuality raised to its 
highest power. But it is not by oddity, or lack of 
balance. Here is one in whom is no strain of seeking 
after self, whose will is absolutely identified with the 
will of God, through whom God lives out his holiness 
and love and power to bless humanity. It was his 
glory to express the indwelling Father in terms of 
life; it is ours to express the indwelling Christ, sur- 
rendered to his will, living out his life. This is the end 
of our being; 

" Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine ! " 

This is the highest achievement of heart and will: 
" I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." To 
this goal our growth and God's grace are tending: 
" Beloved, now are we children of God, and when 
he shall be manifested, we shall be like him." And 
this is the mark of a son, " He doeth the will." 



85 



XIII 

WHO SHALL GIVE YOU THAT WHICH 
IS YOUR OWN? 

' I S HERE is a joy none can take away; there is a 
■*• wealth none can give. Our Lord sums up his 
parable of the unjust steward by saying, " He 
that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in 
much, and he that is unrighteous in a very little is 
unrighteous also in much. If therefore ye have not 
been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will 
commit to your trust the true riches? And if ye have 
not been faithful in that which is another's, who will 
give you that which is your own ? " These last words 
are not a mere parallelism, an ornamental flourish; 
they conduct us into the very heart of the matter. 
The whole saying forms a real and pregnant climax 
of increasing impossibility. " Little — much " : the 
quality which crops out in the nugget or the grain 
runs through the whole lode. " Mammon — true 
riches " : that which does not use aright this coarser 
and meaner thing, and is blind to its possibilities, 
will not administer adequately this finer thing, but 
more than that, — it cannot; it cannot handle it; it 
cannot even grasp it. " Another's — your own " : if 
you have not been a worthy steward, you will not be 
a worthy owner; you cannot be an owner at all; no 

86 



WHO SHALL GIVE YOU YOUR OWN? 

man will give you your own; no man can give you 
your own. 

What is a man's own? Whatever belongs to him 
inalienably, whatever is undetachable, whatever is a 
part of his own being. Three things only, therefore, 
— his spiritual accomplishment, his spiritual experi- 
ence, and his character. These, of course, are also 
God's, but God's ownership in them does not make 
the man's any less. All other things are external, 
accidental, transitive, and, as Emerson says of lan- 
guage, vehicular. They are all detachable. The soul, 
when it goes hence, and often before that, leaves them 
all. These it never leaves. I did that thing for God, 
or rather, God did it through me. It is secure; it is 
mine. It is an asset in the bookkeeping of heaven 
which nothing can blot out. I had this experience of 
God's grace and power. It is mine. Nothing can 
destroy the fact. It has entered into my soul. I 
gained that moral muscle, that discernment, that 
larger vision. It is mine. It cannot be detached. It 
is part of me. There is nothing else that can rightly 
be called my own. Position, possessions, powers, — 
physical, intellectual, social, — they are all " another's." 
But how rich and large this is ! Genius " cannot 
plagiarize; it simply takes its own wherever it finds 
it." " My own " is waiting for me wherever I shall 
find it. It confronts me at every turn. It awaits me 
all along my journey. It is speeding toward me on 
all the ships of circumstance. Who will give it to 
me? No one will give it to me. No one can give 
it to me. It is incommunicable. The hand of man, 
the hand of opportunity, the hand of God, may hold 

87 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

it out to me, but no other hand than mine can grasp 
it for me. Till mine does, the thing in question is 
neither another's nor my own. The seal of ownership 
is appropriation. 

What is hard for us to understand is that the one 
path of appropriation, of coming to one's own, is by 
way of " that which is another's," external, transient, 
alien, earthly. The true riches does not come from 
without, neither can it be evolved from within, pumped 
up out of the opulent depths of our own natures. 
Aside from the question of the divine co-working, it 
is the product of the reaction upon us of our own 
action upon the things that are without. Our inner 
qualities are developed, and so far as we know can be 
developed, only by our relationships with outer things. 
The things themselves are not the most important 
factor, but they are indispensable notwithstanding. 
It might seem to involve a Hibernicism if one were 
to say that the only significance of the outer is their 
share in developing the inner, and that the only real 
significance of the inner is in its effect on the outer, 
but it is true. If this be reasoning in a circle, it is 
not a vicious circle, but a gracious one, for by this 
mutual reaction the full sum of being is attained, 
man gains his growth, and God his glory. A scoffer 
once asked, "What are we here for?" "To help 
others," was the answer. " Then what are the 
others here for ? " was his triumphant question. But 
the answer was easy. How the sum of blessing grows 
by that mutual helpfulness of helping, and helpful- 
ness of being helped, which is twice blest, and blesses 
him that gives and him that takes ! 

88 



WHO SHALL GIVE YOU YOUR OWN? 

To the individual, therefore, in this view, the chief 
significance of the things we touch is that they form 
the gymnastic apparatus of the soul. They are the 
counters and the pieces in the game, whose proper 
use gives the game its value, and is the game. That 
value can be realized in just one way, — unselfish 
fidelity. Unfaithfulness is a non-conducting film 
which stops the thrill of power, the pane of glass 
which shuts out the hungry from the feast, the great 
gulf fixed, here on earth, which not even Father 
Abraham can pass. If a man is not using the " mam- 
mon of unrighteousness " to produce spiritual effects 
for God, if he is not making his intellect, his charm, 
his magnetism, his social gifts, tell in leading men 
nearer to truth as it is in Jesus, in what conceivable 
way can he ever gain that permanent spiritual posses- 
sion of accomplished spiritual good? He is unfaith- 
ful in that which is another's : he never gets " his 
own." If he is not employing life's duties and rela- 
tionships, its sorrows and joys, its fellowships, its 
burdens, in such a way as to develop his discernment, 
his honor, his love, his devotion, his moral strength, 
how and when and where can he gain those qualities 
which are the enduring wealth of the soul? And 
how shall he make these things yield this peaceable 
fruit of righteousness except by meeting each need, 
each situation, each demand, with fidelity and ade- 
quacy, with all that in him is? 

This is all he needs, with God's grace. The most 
splendid spiritual acquisition becomes, in this light, 
the simplest and readiest of processes. Absolutely de- 
pendent on some time and place and deed, it is abso- 

8 9 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

lutely independent of any particular sort of these. The 
intrinsic qualities of the things themselves are indif- 
ferent. The crown is won alike in the kitchen or on 
the throne, in the poet's chamber or the preacher's 
pulpit. One can learn a lesson from the incandescent 
mantles so common to-day. A web of perishable 
cotton is kept submerged in a solution of rare minerals 
till every fiber is saturated. Then the dried fabric 
is subjected to the flames, the cotton vanishes, and in 
its place is left the pure white mineral, which shall 
endure the flame, and not only grow itself the brighter, 
but send a glow out into the night. " That which 
is another's," — these passing, commonplace, almost or 
quite sordid things, how cheap they seem, how alien, — 
cotton, indeed ! We fill them with patience and fidelity 
and love to God and man. The flame touches them. 
The cotton is gone, and we never see it again, but 
there is the white beauty of love, the enduring splendor 
of holiness, to gleam out with the glory of God for- 
ever. What matters the scaffolding now? It was 
" another's." " Our own " remains. It is a palace. 

No man can keep the true soul from his own. He 
finds it everywhere. He finds it when he least thinks 
of it, and is most lost in thinking of another. But 
what a picture is the reverse! Pathetic is the sight 
of some man at whose command, and before whose 
very eyes, is every delicacy which gastronomic art can 
compass, but he cannot eat them or assimilate them, 
and starves in the presence of this abundance, which 
is " his own." More pathetic is that of an idiot king, 
whose title holds to all the pomp and power about 
him, but he does not control one atom of the power, 

90 



WHO SHALL GIVE YOU YOUR OWN? 

and to his darkened mind there penetrates not one 
gleam of this splendor that is " his own." But most 
pathetic is this picture, tragic, rather, with a tragedy 
in whose blackness there is no relief, for it is no 
baffling and hopeless physical disease, no heavy 
stroke of inability for which he is not responsible that 
starves and pauperizes him; it is his own moral failure. 
He is surrounded with every means of spiritual 
growth; before him are the open doors of God's 
treasuries of wealth; the richest food upon the king's 
table is placed full in his view, and he goes through 
life unblessed and unendowed. He never takes his 
seat upon his waiting throne. The one essential 
process of assimilation and possession he never even 
begins to employ. Of all his Father's feast he never 
had a taste. By his daily act he thrusts the crown 
away. Seeking himself supremely, he has disregarded 
others; disregarding others, he has lost himself. "If 
ye be unfaithful in that which is another's, who will 
give you that which is your own ? " 



9i 



XIV 
PREROGATIVE, PRIVILEGE, POWER? 

Have We the Right to Do Wrong? 

'VJEVER is the careless use of words so disastrous 
-^ ^ as when it sheds a false light upon our ideas of 
right and freedom. Then it is that we are set afloat 
among rocks and shoals with a fixed rudder and a 
doctored compass. The wrong notions of three 
common and imposing words furnish a striking illus- 
tration of this favorite deception of Satan. They are 
" prerogative," " privilege," " power." 

With regard to certain indulgences, for example, 
an employer will say : " If a man wants to drink or 
smoke, he can do it; that is his privilege. But he 
cannot be an employee of mine if he does." The 
evangelist, pleading for the acceptance of his Master, 
declares, " You have the fearful power of choice, the 
awful right of free will. It is your prerogative, the 
prerogative of human nature, to choose Jesus Christ 
or to reject him. You can decide to accept the offer 
of salvation, and by the road of God's holiness find 
your way to heaven; or you can turn your back upon 
this, cast in your lot with the lost, and choose separa- 
tion from God, with all that it means. That is your 
privilege. 33 To one who is struggling in the depths 
of sin, he exclaims, " Come up ! live the life of right 

92 



PREROGATIVE, PRIVILEGE, POWER? 

and truth. Be a man. It is in the power of every 
soul to lead that life. Begin it." 

Now all this is not only careless speech, it is arrant 
nonsense and cruel deception, and it almost or quite 
rises to blasphemy. It completely confuses the facts 
in the case. It casts a glamour of apparent right over 
actions that are not right, and by no possibility can 
be right. It credits to an inherent nobility of human 
nature choices and deeds that are never anything but 
ignoble and wrong. It makes men feel that they are 
somehow within allowable limits, when they are in 
fact beyond the dead-line of inexcusable sin. It glori- 
fies Cain and deifies Satan. It fools men into leaning 
on the broken reed of their own ability, and leads them 
to defer or to decline altogether the proffered help 
of God. 

It is no man's privilege to waste his money, sap 
his strength, and endanger or limit or destroy the 
lives and rights of others by indulging in expensive 
or evil habits. It is not an inherent right or a con- 
ferred prerogative of humanity to reject good and God 
incarnate in Jesus Christ, and choose evil and sin. 
Nor, though here we need a more guarded discrimina- 
tion, is it in a man's " power " to begin the upward 
leading life. 

If it be said that these words have come to have 
these popular meanings, so that one is almost more 
critical than the dictionary in rejecting them, it may 
be answered that that is poor virtue which is not 
more scrupulous than the statute book, and poor moral 
sense which is not keener than the speech of men. It 
is in exactly such scrupulous precision that clearness 

93 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

of thought and keenness of virtue lie. Evil lurks in 
this fringe of verbal and moral underbrush. 

What is a " right " ? Even by the dictionary, it is 
" a just and proper claim to anything : a claim 
founded upon any consideration of justice, morality, 
courtesy, custom, civility, or upon either natural or 
positive law." " Prerogative " is " an indefeasible 
and unquestionable right, belonging to a person or 
body of persons by virtue of position or relation, and 
exercised without control or accountability." " Privi- 
lege ? " It is " a peculiar benefit, favor, or advan- 
tage; a right or immunity not enjoyed by all, or that 
may be enjoyed only under special conditions." And 
" power " is " ability to act, regarded as latent or in- 
herent; capacity for action or performance." 

It is God's " right " and " prerogative," " inde- 
feasible and unquestionable," to ask, and demand, 
our obedience; it is neither our right nor our prerog- 
ative to refuse it. The father's prerogative is love; 
but rebellion or indifference is no prerogative of the 
son. The man who does evil is not well within his 
" rights," he is deep within his " wrongs " — to God 
and his own soul. When one rejects Jesus Christ, he 
goes counter to every consideration of " justice, 
morality, courtesy, civility, positive and natural law." 
" Custom," alas ! he may plead, but it is only in 
human law, and within narrow limits there, that cus- 
tom constitutes right. The habit of sin, and the 
going with a multitude to do evil, has never made it 
good. Human nature has the power of choosing evil, 
but assuredly no " indefeasible right," or right at all. 
It is true that the choice is " without " outward " con- 

94 



PREROGATIVE, PRIVILEGE, POWER? 

trol," but it is not " without accountability." Before 
the bar of justice, love, and gratitude, the soul who 
turns back upon the One altogether lovely, and the 
chiefest among ten thousand, when he comes unto his 
own, must " show cause " and " answer for it " for- 
ever. " How often would I " — " But ye would not." 
" This is the judgment, that the light is come into 
the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the 
light- 
There is indeed a gracious privilege in the matter, 
the God-given privilege of accepting Jesus Christ and 
becoming " accepted in the beloved," but not even 
this is in the primitive sense a privilege. Privilege is 
privi-legium, a private law, an opportunity not given 
to all people, or open only under special conditions. 
There is no privilege in that first sense with God. He 
is no respecter of persons. " Whosoever will " may 
" come." The opportunity of eternal life is a privi- 
lege in the second sense. Right did not confer it. 
Labor cannot earn it. Grace bestows it under special 
conditions, — trust and obedience. But for wrong- 
doing, whether in our attitude to Christ or to virtue 
and love, great or small, there is and can be no privi- 
legium, no private law nor conditional permission. 
It is never anybody's right to destroy uselessly, or to 
commit slow suicide. Twenty-four hours in the day, 
three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, one 
hundred years in the century, with no allowance out 
for leap year or a single inserted second, right is right, 
and wrong is wrong, and sin is sin. God issues no 
dispensations from virtue. The sin may be very at- 
tractive, very politic, most necessary, modern in the 

95 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

extreme, but it can never be anything else nor any- 
thing less than sin. 

" In vain we call old notions fudge, 

And bend our conscience to our dealing; 
The Ten Commandments will not budge, 
And stealing will continue stealing." 

Call it rebellion, usurpation, crime, embezzlement, sin- 
ful waste, — it is not privilege. 

And there is no " inherent or latent " " power " in 
that poor man whom we summon to right and liberty. 
Without trenching on the vexed old theological ques- 
tions of " ability " and " inability," we all know our- 
selves well enough to be sure that only as the abound- 
ing grace of God works with us are we able to tread, or 
enter, that upward path, that " apart from me ye can 
do nothing," and that it is only " in him that strength- 
ened " us that we can do " all things " or anything 
morally effective or spiritually vital. What man has 
is not "power"; it is possibility. The power, like 
the right, comes from without. Possibility where the 
source of power is external is capacity. Capacity is 
simply power to receive. To " as many as received 
him, to them gave he the power (American Revision, 
the "right" — but right conferred is power granted,) 
to become the children of God." This is no idle dis- 
tinction. He who has inherent power may exercise 
it as he will and when he will; he who has capacity 
must accept the conditions of time and plan and 
manner of him who must add his power to the other's 
possibility to make it reality. Every soul should 
understand that it is duty and wisdom to " seek Je- 

9 6 



PREROGATIVE, PRIVILEGE, POWER? 

hovah while he may be found, and call upon him 
while he is near." " If so be " is a needed spur, and 
it expresses a profound and awful fact. 

As human beings, therefore, what is ours is freedom 
of choice, and possibility of redemption. No word of 
ours ought to obscure the situation for ourselves or 
others. Put it plainly: You are free to choose right 
or wrong. You are allowed to decide whether you 
will take Christ or reject him. If you determine to 
indulge in such and such things, you can, and your- 
self and others will bear the consequences. But you 
have no privilege in the matter. You are Cain slay- 
ing your brother, and driving yourself into the desert. 
You have no prerogative here at all. You are denying 
God's prerogative in the very act of asserting what you 
call your own. You are Satan attempting to usurp the 
throne of God. But one " privilege " you have, not 
private, but extended to you and all men alike, the 
privilege of the grace of God. Accept that and you 
will have a prerogative, — a right conferred in virtue of 
a relation, — the prerogative of the sons of God, heirs 
of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. And then 
you will receive " power " indeed, the power of an 
endless life, the power of his resurrection, of him who 
is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we 
ask or even think. 



97 



XV 
BAD TEMPERAMENT AS AN ASSET 

"VTOBODY will dispute the proposition that tem- 
-^^ perament is an asset, as applied to a cheerful, 
buoyant, or even temperament. The man who would 
choose a million dollars with lifelong gloom rather 
than poverty with lifelong sunshine would deserve the 
grand prize of folly, and would get it. Temper, as has 
often been said, is nine-tenths of life. Housewife, 
martyr, reformer, statesman, or merchant, owes hap- 
piness, success, and victory, more than to any other 
human factor, to this sustaining, transmuting, and 
magnetic force. 

The difficulty appears when one tries to apply the 
proposition to a temperament of the sort called unfor- 
tunate, moody, despondent, irascible, variable. That 
would seem to be an asset on the wrong side of the 
balance-sheet. But it behooves us to be believers in 
God to the extent of assuming that when a man takes 
stock of his inherited equipment there is nothing in 
the inventory that is not an integral part of his work- 
ing capital, intended by the great Designer of lives to 
furnish in one way or another some element of power 
or approach to efficiency. He of whom " every man's 
life is a plan " has made no mistake in assigning to 
each of his workmen his own place, machinery, and 
material. A temperament is like the weather, — any 

9 8 



BAD TEMPERAMENT AS AN ASSET 

temperament is better than none at all. We might like 
to take our choice, but since our choice has not been 
given us, our best part is to discover what can be made 
out of our assignment. 

In a purely natural way one might find a certain 
value in these traits of mind and spirit, in, the fact 
that our peculiar sort is needed to modify other in- 
gredients in the seething caldron of human life, to be a 
check on opposite tendencies. Oxygen is indispensa- 
ble to the fires of industry or of life, but an atmosphere 
all oxygen would be fatal. Nitrogen may be inert, 
positively negative, so to say, but it is as useful in its 
way. Optimism needs the check of the pessimistic 
tendency. " A grain of glory mixed with humbleness 
will cure a fever or lethargicness." But who wants 
to play infusorial earth or sawdust to the world's nitro- 
glycerine in order to produce dynamite ? And besides, 
these qualities are inherently wrong, some of them by 
negation, and others by positive bent. In this natural 
reckoning they are not assets; they are deficits, they 
are evil. It is only in view of the spiritual life and 
the grace of God that they assume their value. The 
significance of any particle of matter or any point in 
space is found not in its substance or its latitude and 
longitude, but in the forces that pulse through it, or 
may be made to do so. 

A temperament of the unfortunate variety is a most 
valuable asset, because it furnishes a beautiful place 
for a battle and a victory. The man who has no 
temperament to fight has undoubtedly an easier time 
of it, and no one is called upon to go out of his way 
to avoid that, — or to seek it; but he misses some- 

99 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

thing in the way of strength and power and victory 
which is presented to the other. Life is for growth, 
and growth in its sturdier aspects rarely comes with- 
out struggle. " Lead us not into temptation " ; but 
through the conflict when it comes, and the conquest, 
give us strength ! Great battles are not for the present 
delightsome, but they decide in favor of righteousness, 
and give the deathblow to oppression. The nations 
that know them not make no progress. The tropic 
dweller gains no moral fiber. 

Yet one would feel like declining the struggle did 
he not discern, again, the value of temperament in that 
it presents an almost matchless opportunity to use 
God's grace, and so to get to know God as he cannot 
in any other way be known. It is doubtless possible 
to see God out in the open, under the broad heaven, 
and happy is the man who really sees him there. But 
too often the sunlight blinds the eyes. We are more 
apt to see him when something shuts out the wide 
prospects of success and unimpeded impulse, and 
shuts us in to the seclusion and the shadow. 

" Eyes that the preacher could not school, 
By wayside graves are raised, 
And lips say, ' God be merciful,' 
That ne'er said, ' God be praised.' " 

It may be questioned whether there are not certain 
qualities of God that it is impossible to see, or at least 
to realize, except in the narrow valley of struggle and 
sorrow. 

" It lieth afar between mountains ; and God and the angels are 
there ; 
And one is the dark mount of sorrow; and one the bright 
mountain of prayer." 

IOO 



BAD TEMPERAMENT AS AN ASSET 

When the soul has recognized that awful handicap, 
as nature calls it, of a despondent or envious disposi- 
tion, and has been forced in its utter helplessness to 
lay hold on God, and finds, as it surely will find, how 
God responds and gives victory, there is a revelation 
of God sweeter and better than elsewhere; yes, im- 
possible elsewhere. Beautiful is the valley where I 
meet my God. " Wherefore I take pleasure in weak- 
nesses, in injuries, in necessities.' , 

With this thought we are able, perhaps, to rise to 
another, a frequent thought in the mind of Paul; this 
handicap of ours, now that we have it, is a glorious 
opportunity for God to show forth his power. " Who 
sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born 
blind? " " Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: 
but that the works of God should be made manifest 
in him.' , " Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, 
that in me as chief might Jesus Christ show forth all 
his longsuffering, for an ensample of them that should 
thereafter believe on him unto eternal life." " Who 
sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be 
born with this envy, this irascibility, this gloom ? " 
" That is not pertinent to the situation : neither he 
nor his parents, but that the works of God might be 
manifest in him." For as the man born blind, but 
reborn into sight, went forth to spread the glory of 
Jesus Christ, so a violent temper tamed and in har- 
ness, despondency toned up to sweet and comfortable 
faith, irritability conquered, and impatience subdued, 
are trophies that not only enhance the glory of Jesus, 
but bring other bondmen of sin into his liberating 
captivity, and that weakness of mine becomes the 

IOI 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

conductor along which his power flows to transform 
others as it is transforming me. 

In that contact with other lives, perhaps the greatest 
value of this weakness turned into a power is the fact 
that it gives him and me an approach to those who 
need us. " For it became him ... in bringing many 
sons unto glory to make the author of their salvation 
perfect through sufferings," since no man can lead 
another through ways he has not traversed himself, 
or be able to touch him save through that mysterious 
contact of a common experience. It is dreadful to 
me sometimes to think that I have had to struggle with 
this unlovely trait, this haunting evil, this painful 
weakness; but in that experience is my approach to a 
hundred others like me, and in that, overcome by the 
grace of God, is my power to help. When God put me 
together, he left that spot for his approach to sin- 
smitten humanity. None must seek by his own act 
to furnish that avenue for God, but, finding it to exist, 
shall he not recognize his opportunity and thank God 
that through him may flow the divine power? With 
what tenderness henceforth he touches the unhealed 
sores of men, sores like his own before God began 
to work on him! From this priesthood of sympathy 
are shut out the strong, the sound, the unblemished, 
the untempted ; into it come they alone who were lame 
and halt and blind, and One who was tempted in all 
points like as we, but without sin. 

So it must be remembered that the whole value of 
this asset lies in its use, in the power that pulses 
through it, in the obedience of faith, the struggle 
of determination, the supply of help, the victory of 

1 02 



BAD TEMPERAMENT AS AN ASSET 

grace. Without this, it is the weight that tends to sink 
us " deeper than ever plummet sounded." Thrilled 
by the electricity of God, it becomes the magnet which 
holds us to the greater magnet, and draws others 
through us to him. 



103 



XVI 
THE LIMITATIONS OF SELF-RESPECT 

SELF-RESPECT is counted one of the most valu- 
able assets of the soul, but it has its distinct and 
decided limitations. It is, of course, a very comforta- 
ble feeling, although it might be questioned whether 
in most cases more comfort or less comfort is to be 
desired. It is a helpful antidote for the scorn or dis- 
approval of our fellows when we have followed the 
guidance of conscience rather than the wishes of men. 
If we have, unjustly, forfeited the good opinion of 
our neighbors, then self-respect more than takes its 
place, and without it, their good opinion would be but 
ashes in our mouths. It is a valuable negative ingredi- 
ent in our spiritual strength and comfort. The small 
boy defined salt as " what makes things taste bad when 
it is left out." The discomfort caused by the absence 
of self-respect to one who still retains the memory of 
its flavor is greater than the comfort of its presence, — 
" a little less, and how much away ! " 

And self-respect has proved in countless instances 
a mighty specific against temptation, a shield against 
sin. Conscious of clean instincts and a clean record, 
the man more easily says " no " to the blandishments 
or the threats of evil. " Shall such a man as I do 
this? " The " white flower of a blameless life " per- 
petually incites to resistance against anything that can 

104 



THE LIMITATIONS OF SELF-RESPECT 

blot or blemish. Where this brings to bear the forces 
of conscience, the memories of a noble ancestry, 
" trained for ten long centuries to hate and loathe a 
lie," all the power of consistent devotion to high 
ideals, its aspect is most admirable, summed up in 
that beautiful motto " noblesse oblige " [" rank im- 
poses obligation "]. 

And yet, very valuable as an auxiliary, when self- 
respect sets out to do battle alone it is a superficial 
and futile thing, a broken reed on which, if a 
man lean, it will pierce his hand, a defense of 
straw. 

Like a balloon or a steel ship, it is good only while 
it is unpunctured. The man is one of Shakespeare's 
" little wanton boys that swim on bladders." Let 
his self-respect, if this be all he has built upon, once 
be broken over, and a breach in his defenses has 
been made which may be fatal. The more implicitly 
he has depended on it, and the greater his pride in it, 
the more disastrous the injury. A schoolboy had 
earned the honorable title of "the boy that never 
looks back." Innumerable temptations had assailed 
him, and nothing could induce him to turn his head. 
But one day a circumstance arose, extraordinary, 
unique. Even his seasoned virtue gave way. He 
looked back. And his fate was sealed. The bubble 
was pricked. The man, doubtless, will not yield as 
easily as that, but his chief defense has proved de- 
fective. It will never after have the strength that he 
thought it had. He is a city broken down and without 
walls. 

For self-respect is sure to be punctured. It is too 

105 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

weak for the forces that assail. Somewhere in the 
world is the enemy that is stronger. This is the truth 
in that bitter cynicism, " every man has his price. ,, It 
simply means that there exists potentially some com- 
bination of forces outward and inward which may be 
too much for the inward moral strength of any man 
whatsoever. There is no use in ignoring that fact. 
Every day of human history, neither more nor less 
these latest days, proves it. Motives for virtue which 
derive their strength entirely from within are unable 
to make head against the awful aggregation of mo- 
tives, outward and inward, that attack. If self-respect 
rushes her soldiers to the breach, some other self- 
grounded motive — fear, indolence, cupidity, passion, 
desire — takes a hand. Self is always the arbiter, and 
self, self-bribed, is prone to lean insensibly to the side 
of ease or profit or pleasure. It will be strange if some 
one of the powers of evil does not find the vulnerable 
spot. Then pride becomes a cobweb, a distant, vague, 
intangible thing; and desire is present, real, tangible, 
ponderable, — and victor. 

Even in the cases, and they are not as many as we 
think, where the overt sin does not prevail, where 
there is no outward surrender and defeat, self-respect 
is ineffective against the mighty host of spiritual sins. 
Indeed, under this very bulwark is the favorite 
ground where the most dangerous plant their siege 
engines, make their entrance, and win their battle 
before the garrison has a suspicion of their presence. 
Self-respect does not put up a very good fight against 
envy, or avarice, or jealousy, or malice, but it usually 
throws the door wide open to pride, to an anger that 

106 



THE LIMITATIONS OF SELF-RESPECT 

masks itself as righteous indignation, to contempt, 
forgetfulness of God, ingratitude, or uncharity. And 
fearful as the nature and the results of overt and 
flagrant sins are, the moral ruin and the spiritual 
alienation they work are no greater than those wrought 
by these spiritual hosts of wickedness in high places. 
" The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom 
of God before you." One can conceive no shrewder 
strategy of the enemy, with souls of a certain type, 
than thus to amuse the garrison with the fiction that 
they are defeating him on the side of open sin through 
the force of self-respect, while under the cover of that 
noisy battle he finds entrance on the subtler and more 
fatal side of the spiritual sin. 

The truth is, self-respect is a fiction. The thing 
that underlies it is an imaginary thing. One would 
not ignore the fact that many men rightly rejoice in 
conscious integrity of general purpose, and in a cer- 
tain cleanness of taste, instinct, and habit, and in a 
certain amount of success in the struggle against in- 
clination, indolence, and passion. But what is that, 
as a foundation for self-respect? The men who best 
know virtue, and self, and God, the high saints, 
never say anything about self-respect. They see too 
clearly the high and deep and exceeding broad re- 
quirements of the law, and the grace of God, and the 
.awful distance between that exalted standard and their 
own achievement; and they are still. For " merit lives 
from man to man, and not from man, O Lord, to thee." 
*' But now mine eye seeth thee, wherefore I abhor 
myself, and repent in dust and ashes." Is it said that 
the testimony of these high saints is that of the 

107 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

" saintly temperament," and not of the " healthy 
mind " ? There are no healthy minds. Two kinds of 
minds there are, and these only: the mind that sees 
its disease, and has come — or has not, alas — to the 
great Physician for healing; and the mind that knows 
not its disease, but is saying, " Peace, when there is no 
peace," and has plastered over its sores with the fiction 
of self-respect. Is this cynicism, cant? It is Scrip- 
ture, fortified by every newspaper, and corroborated 
by every code of laws from Moses and Hammurabi 
until this hour. 

What then have we left? Nothing. And every- 
thing. We have taken away the shield of straw, the 
sword of lath. What in their stead? Self-respect; 
but this time not for the self that has been, nor for 
the self that is, but for the self that shall be, for the 
man that is to be, the high calling of God in Christ 
Jesus. Respect, however, not chiefly even for that, — 
whatever is built on the basis of any self is weak, — 
but respect for God. Joseph's cry, " How can I do 
this great wickedness, and sin against God ? " is the 
formula of power. An external authority, obligation 
to another, the standard of another, the inquisition of 
another, not the judgment day of our own conscience 
alone, but the flame of the divine gaze : these are the 
things that stiffen virtue and hold in the face of tempta- 
tion. Above all respect unto God, over and above all 
that our own conscience can do, our own will, our own 
strength of purpose — that look of the sinking Peter, 
that look of the struggling Paul, that look of the 
smitten Israelite, away from the weak and wavering 
self to the unchangeable grace of the living God. 

1 08 



THE LIMITATIONS OF SELF-RESPECT 

Our strength cometh, not from the hills which sur- 
round us, still less from the hills on which we sit; our 
strength " cometh from Jehovah, who made heaven 
and earth." "God, be thou merciful to me the 



109 



XVII 

THE SAVING GRACE OF 
INCONSISTENCY 

T INCONSISTENCY is provoking, irritating, aggra- 
■** vating. It shocks our sense of symmetry and 
fitness. It disturbs our calculations, disappoints our 
hopes, and makes life seem a lottery. When we build 
we would like assurance of stability, but this is ever 
balking us. It is always disquieting to feel that some 
human chemical element is going to act one way one 
day and another the next; that human nature will not 
" stay put." How much of it there is, and how great 
is its variety ! 

There is the inconsistency of the plain " frivol,'' 
light of mind and heart, the play of every wind that 
blows, the foam of the sea. Of the opportunist, who 
has, no doubt, his own steady (and selfish) purpose, 
but whom we find blowing now hot, now cold, now 
East, now West, according to the prevailing breezes. 
Of the Pharisee, perhaps unconscious of the fact, who 
strains out a gnat and swallows a camel, sensitive to 
slight sins and dull to great ones. There is the in- 
consistency of the hypocrite, who covers the deep 
damnation of his inner soul by some fair show of 
scrupulousness. Of the sordid calculating sinners, no 
hypocrites, but also no saints, who drive a bargain 
with their own conscience, if not with heaven, and 

" Compound for sins they are inclined to 
By damning those they have no mind to " ; 
IIO 



SAVING GRACE OF INCONSISTENCY 

Of the one-sided thinker who denies to-day the logical 
consequences of his opinions of yesterday (and of to- 
day as well). Of the "average man," overborne by 
the present look or trend, wishing to do well, and to 
have his present accord with his past, but unable to 
pierce to the real inner meaning of things and 
thoughts, and so forever veering, and rarely knowing 
it. " Oh, consistency, thou art a jewel ! " 

But inconsistency is a jewel, too. It is freedom, the 
breath of life, salvation. It must be inconsistency of 
the right sort, of course. Moral inconsistency has no 
proper place in God's universe, high or low. But 
times without number the true inconsistency has 
proved a saving grace. It retards declension. It 
prevents error, it preserves sanity, it promotes ad- 
vance. It also softens the hard outlines of routine and 
formal living. It cracks the shell of dull and slavish 
conformity to outward law or opinion. It points out 
the way to the large spaces of the Spirit. 

The man who, in a right way, can be boldly " in- 
consistent " can live on both sides of a truth. He 
may have to do it, as American polygamy is now 
mostly conducted, " tandem," and not " abreast," 
but he must do it. Any truth of God is too large for 
the greatest human mind to grasp its opposites and its 
inner connections all at once. We must stand first 
on one side and then on the other. It is the one- 
sided stand that makes on the one hand the " heretic," 
disagreeable, troublesome, and sometimes " pesti- 
lent," and on the other the narrow and even perse- 
cuting bigot. " System " is a noble thing, and the 
normal mind is evermore impelled to seek after it; it 

in 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

is in our bone and blood and sinew. But we must 
also perceive our limitations, and discover that the 
crystal globe of truth is too massive for the single- 
handed clutch. Very probably, with increased knowl- 
edge and power the relations and reconciliations of 
things will more and more appear; but something must 
be left, no doubt forever, for the researches of eternity, 
and meanwhile we can shamelessly and boldly hold 
the things we see, although their juncture is beyond 
our sight. 

This " saving grace " enables a man to achieve 
another very valuable accomplishment, that of living 
on all sides of his own nature. " How is it," said the 
young woman to her friend, " that you are so differ- 
ent at different times ? Sometimes you are so robust, 
strong, manly, and then again so effeminate, im- 
pulsive, dependent." " Oh," he said, " that is very 
easy. Half my ancestors were men, and half were 
women." A man is but a woman developed upon 
the manward side more than on the other; and vice 
versa. There will always be " inconsistency " as the 
strong, massive, aggressive elements now prevail, and 
now the tenderer, softer, more intuitive. That soul 
which holds itself down to the one or the other 
truncates its own being, atrophies its own life, refuses 
its largest growth. You may well be afraid of your- 
self if you never find your thought or emotion seem- 
ingly at war with one you had last week, or an hour 
ago. 

This living on all sides of one's nature is what has 
saved both individuals and the world at large from 
the tyranny and consequences of their own narrow 

112 



SAVING GRACE OF INCONSISTENCY 

and partial creeds, whether political, social, or re- 
ligious. Perhaps all creeds are partial and narrow, — 
certainly all but ours; and since we have never taken 
in the whole range of knowledge and feeling, it is 
possible that even our inductions are too limited and 
our deductions now and then misled. When we are 
brought straight up against living facts, palpitating 
situations, and breathing men and women, theories 
crack or stretch. Some of them ought not, it may be. 
But some of them ought. For while no public ques- 
tion, any more than a theological problem, is to be 
determined on sentimental or emotional grounds 
alone, the heart is a statesman and theologian who 
has as valid claims to be heard as ever had the head. 
Had it not been for this blessed grace of inconsistency 
there had been times when the life and love of human 
kind would have been crushed beneath a Juggernaut 
of scholastic reasoning, which after all left perhaps 
the largest body of facts out of consideration. There 
has not been enough of it to save the world from 
being too often a torture-room, but without it men 
would have pursued to the bitter end the logic of one- 
sided conviction. God is to be thanked that under the 
snows of clear, cold, critical thinking lie the lava lakes 
of human sympathy and love which will now and then 
break forth, illogical as the eruption may seem. 

Inconsistency leaves the man free, again, to meet 
situations as they are, unhindered, undeterred. Prob- 
ably nothing has so hampered humanity as has the 
" dead hand " of the past, the general past, or our 
own particular, personal past, precedent slowly hard- 
ening into law. This sort of consistency is, indeed, 

113 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

" the hobgoblin of little minds." It would confine 
throbbing life within the sepulchers of the dead. 
What I did, even what I thought, yesterday, is done, 
it is thought. It met a certain situation. It was 
based on certain knowledge, a certain outlook. To- 
day I face a new situation, with wider knowledge, 
with a better grasp, it should be, of the same deep 
principles I had yesterday. What care I for incon- 
sistency? My consistency is not with the outgrown 
shells of things, but with the abiding and eternal truth 
of God in the living, expanding present. Yesterday 
" I gave place in the way of subjection, no, not for 
an hour, and even Titus, being a Greek, was not com- 
pelled to be circumcised," but to-day Timothy my be- 
loved son shall undergo that rite, and to-morrow I 
shall be in the temple to pay the charges of those who 
have made a vow. It was a severe criticism of Glad- 
stone that at different times of his life he occupied 
such opposite positions upon great questions; but it 
was his glory. 

And it was his safety and advance, for this saving 
grace is the open door to truth. It puts our hand 
into the hand of our Guide, who through the events 
of life, the thoughts of men, and his own intimations, 
leads us into all the truth. Was it not Agassiz who 
greeted a friend with beaming face : " You know I 
have been teaching for twenty years such and such 
a thing about certain fossils ? Well, I have just read 
So-and-So's book, and he has proved to me that it is 
not so at all ! " It is to be feared that that consistency 
we pride ourselves upon is too often intellectual inertia, 
stubbornness, and vanity. We will not advance to 

114 



SAVING GRACE OF INCONSISTENCY 

truth because it looks like retreat from our posi- 
tion. 

Of course all this is not inconsistency at all. It is 
deepest consistency. It is truth, truth to one's self, to 
one's profoundest convictions. It is faith, faith in 
God, belief that his truth is larger than anything we 
have yet beheld, and that he who seeks it, and will 
learn, shall be guided by One who, whatever the means 
he uses, has one goal. It is openness of mind, that 
childlikeness through which we enter into the King- 
dom. It is freedom, from partialness, from pride, 
from fear, from slavery of mind and heart. It is not 
caprice. It does not cut loose unduly from the past. 
It gives that past its proper weight. It does not despise 
the scientific and the logical. They have their just 
claims. To disregard them would be to invite vagary 
and delusion. But it opens its ears to other witnesses 
as well. It is not vacillation. The pilot whose eye is 
on the star, whose heart is at the goal, whose mind 
is on the chart, may tack this way and that, may 
thread now this devious channel of smooth water and 
now that, until his path looks intricate and aimless to 
those who cannot read his law or see his star, but he 
avoids rocks, shoals, and currents without number. 
He is the one supremely steady man that sails the 
seas. 



ii5 



XVIII 

THE FORMULA OF IMMUNITY 

THE danger of contagion is unavoidable. If we 
stood still, the winds would bring it to us. We 
cannot live our own individual lives in this world, and 
keep it out. Indeed, as servants of Christ, our work 
among the crowding sons of men is expressly con- 
cerned with contagion. Christ's followers are the 
world's relief corps, its physicians, its nurses, its sani- 
tary engineers, and they must plunge into the heart 
of its fever swamps, its abodes of disease. Well might 
we wish for some armor of proof, some enveloping 
atmosphere, clad in which we could go about our work 
unharmed; some antitoxin by which, once adminis- 
tered, we might be forever immune ! Is there such an 
armor, such an antitoxin ? 

Many would rely upon the higher natural instincts, 
a certain innate cleanliness and nobility of soul which 
instinctively, unconsciously, repels the evil. Unfor- 
tunately we are so sadly mingled with the dust, the 
dust polluted by our own and our fathers' sins, that 
we cannot be sure that the baser may not in some 
unguarded moment assert itself above the higher; and 
such is the effect of continuous association that we 
have no guarantee that the best in us may not slowly 
be assimilated to that which surrounds it, as the hot- 
test fire, unreplenished, sinks at last to the temperature 
of the enwrapping air. 

116 



THE FORMULA OF IMMUNITY 

Others feel that they can move unharmed amid 
these perils, girded and guarded by a resolute will, 
an inflexible determination to adhere to a prescribed 
and ordered righteousness. Without this, to be sure, 
the man is a city broken down and without walls. 
But the enemies are subtle, and the garrison is divided, 
and sometimes somnolescent, and memory is feeble, 
and will is weak, and purpose flags. 

Some desperately propose inoculation as the secret 
of immunity. Have the disease once, or some cognate 
form, like cowpox for smallpox, and get well over it. 
Once feel the awfulness of sin, or its emptiness, by 
bitter experience, be rescued from it, and it henceforth 
means nothing to you, — you are sterile to it. The best 
workers amid the slums are the slum's converted deni- 
zens; they are in least danger of contagion. But that 
is neither good theory nor good fact. Any disease 
" takes it out of a man," but it takes away more than 
the elements which nourish it; it takes away some of 
those that nourish him. It leaves the soul weaker, 
and it leaves lingering germs in unsuspected places. 
It does not make immune; it makes susceptible. There 
is no help here. 

Still others, rushing to the opposite extreme, would 
hedge the life away from contact, or hedge it about 
with a network of rules and restrictions, reinforcing 
the fallible will with buttresses of promise and honor 
and pledge and rule. Yet was there ever a system of 
rules air tight, or a gate thrice barred which could not 
be unlocked by the man in charge ? 

Much more promising are those methods which 
may be called spiritual. There is the rule of prayer, 

117 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

which continuously surrounds the soul with the at- 
mosphere of the divine protection, and calls down 
the heavenly legions at the moment of need. There 
is the rule of faith, wherein the soul confidently trusts 
that it will be protected. He who fears not, often 
moves amid the pestilence as if the banner of guardian- 
ship were over him. Yet the wings of prayer some- 
times falter, and faith may be presumption, leading us 
where angels fear to tread, or omitting the precau- 
tions with which flesh and blood cannot dispense. 

Getting absorbed in some right interest is, almost 
more than these, a mighty secret of vigorous health, — 
" the expulsive power of a new affection." The Salva- 
tion Army " lassie " moves amid the contagion of the 
slums, in and out of its most dangerous places, which 
fairly reek with corruption, and she touches its most 
awful sores in a way which for one engaged there in 
another manner and for other motives would mean 
inevitable infection; but she bears a charmed life. 
A thousand fall at her side and ten thousand at her 
right hand, but it does not come nigh her. A mind 
so full of one thought is safe from others; and when 
that thought is wholly outgo, when the currents of life 
are all strongly outward, it must be a vigorous germ of 
evil, indeed, that can stem them and find its way 
up into the fountain. When, in addition, they are 
thoughts of purity and love, evil can find no cohesion 
with them. Like that white flower at the coal-pit's 
mouth, their own secretions wash away the dust that 
settles and will not let it stay. But immunity like 
this in its perfection may be for angels; it is not for 
men here on earth. Perfect love casteth out fear and 

118 



THE FORMULA OF IMMUNITY 

resisteth contagion, but love is not yet made perfect, 
and at the point where she fails, fear finds an entrance 
and disease lodges a germ. 

What, then, is the availing secret? It is one 
which fortifies our natural instincts, or sanctifies them, 
reinforces and utilizes the will, uses rules, works 
through purpose, prayer, faith, and love, deepens the 
outward flow of life's currents, and gives them all 
their strength. That secret is the presence within the 
soul of an outgoing life, intrinsically stronger than 
the evil life which touches it, immune by reason of 
its own sin-destroying power, its burning holiness. 
It is the indwelling life of God. It is " Christ in 
you." There are springs in the ocean that not all its 
salt water can pollute, because they send up their waters 
with a force that the ocean cannot overcome, and they 
have that force because high in the mountains is a 
great sheet of water, fed from the inexhaustible reser- 
voirs of the air, which is ever pressing down and in 
and up and out. They head in heaven, and the earth 
or the sea cannot prevail against them. This is 
Zechariah's vision of the lamps and the olive-trees. 
It is Bunyan's vision of the fire that was not quenched, 
though the adversary continually threw water on it; 
for there was one behind the wall forever replenishing 
it with oil. 

This indwelling life of God is the secret of im- 
munity. There is no other. For all other life there 
is somewhere some contagion which is too powerful 
to be repelled or resisted, but " the prince of the 
world cometh : and he hath nothing in me." " Apart 
from me ye can do nothing." This life every child of 

119 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

God possesses and may confidently rely upon. It is 
his only reliance. It is his complete reliance. But it is 
effective for immunity only when it is trusted with the 
obedience and the receptiveness, as well as the confi- 
dence, of faith. What we are prone to forget is the 
part our own action must play. We cannot originate 
it, for it is the originating power. We cannot even 
of ourselves maintain it, for " it is God who worketh 
in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure. ,, 
But what our action does is to furnish it the oppor- 
tunity of effective operation at the outposts of con- 
tagion. The only avenue through which this ocean of 
force can flow is the emotion or will or act of the man. 
Will, effort, purpose, love, prayer, faith, are its chan- 
nels. If these be choked, little or much, by just so 
much the supply received is scanty, the pressure 
feeble, and contagion forces its way in. When these 
are wide open, the gates of hell cannot prevail. We 
are more than conquerors. Christ becomes in us not 
only the hope but the realization of glory. 

This is supremely the teaching of his own human 
life among us. How serene he moved amid the 
thronging diseases and contagions of the world ! He 
touched the leper and was undefiled; the harlot wiped 
his feet with her hair and he was unpolluted. The 
meanness, the jealousy, the corruptions, the weakness, 
of all he met, brushed against him, pressed in upon 
him, bore down with awful weight, and caused no 
ulcer, nor even left a mark. It was the indwelling 
life of God! But maintained with what scrupulous 
obedience, with what resolute resistance of evil, with 
what unceasing love, with what unslumbering dili- 

120 



THE FORMULA OF IMMUNITY 

gence, with what strenuous prayer! This is the 
formula of immunity: "I in them, and thou in me, 
that they may be perfected into one." " I can do all 
things in him that strengtheneth me." " Keep your- 
selves in the love of God." 



121 



XIX 
THE CHRISTIAN DUTY OF "FRONT" 

"T7R0NT" is a colloquial word for a thing that 
-■- may be very condemnable, or very commend- 
able, but is sure to be very important. The face we 
present to the world, the carriage of our bodies, 
our attitude toward the problems and demands of 
life, not only as operative in inward feeling, but as 
seen in expression, movement, posture, are almost more 
than half the battle. The particular combination of 
circumstances which fronts us does not chiefly decide 
our destiny, but rather the port and manner with 
which we front it. There are circumstances which no 
confidence or bravery can overcome, but there are 
no circumstances out of which, with the blessing of 
God, these cannot wrest the prize of real and lasting 
good. And these are within our power. We can 
face our fellows, or our fate, calmly, confidently, se- 
renely, with persistent purpose, or in mind and body 
we can slink and falter and advertise to all that we 
are sinking. Most of us have felt, perhaps, that all 
we could do was to meet life's demands, somehow, 
as faithfully and as bravely as we could, without ex- 
hausting our nerve force in the additional production 
of " face " or " front." But " face " and " front " 
are not added burdens; they are steel armor (brass, 
some would say), and they are motive power. More 

122 



THE CHRISTIAN DUTY OF " FRONT " 

than that, " face " is a duty to our fellows and to our 
God as well as to ourselves. 

A man's bearing is the principal ingredient he fur- 
nishes to the flavor of other people's lives. Courage, 
cheer, confidence are contagious, and so are doubt, 
dread, despair. What right have we to bring a de- 
pressed and gloomy countenance into the presence of 
men and women who themselves are having a hard 
struggle for victory or even for existence ? That smile 
of hope, that quiet determination, braces them like 
a tonic. Our discouragement is the last ounce that 
sends the struggling swimmer to the bottom. " Then 
went in that other disciple." And if, because of our 
frank despondency, it is written, " Then went down 
that other disciple," some of his blood is on our head. 
A frown may be murder, a droop of the mouth may 
be accessory before the fact. It is our duty to put 
our doubts and dreads and failures far in the back- 
ground, among the rubbish, and our hope, cheer, vir- 
tues in the show window. It is sinful selfishness not 
to put on our faces the look of the feeling that we ought 
to have. 

In the furtherance of our own success, " front " is 
powerful in its effect upon the world. The largest 
share of life's outward progress, and no small part of 
its inner advance, is dependent upon the suffrages or 
sufferances of our fellows. We get what they vote us 
or concede us. Both these depend upon what our bear- 
ing asks or demands from them. The world reacts 
upon men in direct correspondence to the way they act 
upon the world. This man's whole look and posture 
is an apology for existence; and the men he meets at 

123 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

once acknowledge the necessity, and question the suf- 
ficiency, of the apology. This other is asking for the 
privilege of being unnoticed and is promptly accorded 
it. His neighbor conducts himself as if life were a 
perpetual jest, and is accepted as the biggest joke in 
it. The air of this other is that of the vanquished. 
" All is over but the funeral." That wounded bison, 
surrounded by the snapping wolves, does not more 
eloquently proclaim by droop of shoulder, tremor of 
limb, and roll of eye that the moment has come for 
the sudden rush which ends the battle, than this man 
shows that his cause is desperate, and that a push will 
end him. That invitation to a push the world of self- 
ishness rarely fails to accept. The synonym for a 
marked success is " to make a killing." It is a brute 
impulse and ought to find no place in the Christian 
world, but it is natural even for the Christian to give 
his push-in-aid where it promises good rather than to 
waste it in a cause that seems hopelessly lost. 

Of course, we must remember that, while that man 
who pushes on with confident and self-absorbed self- 
assertion overbears the lesser assertiveness of the 
ninety and nine, he also rouses in them a latent an- 
tagonism that smolders till circumstances gather it 
into a flame of resentment. At last his self-assertion 
challenges the strength of some brute as great as or 
greater than himself, and he goes down before su- 
perior bulk or brawn or cunning. But given the man 
of serious, hopeful aspect, confident, expectant, per- 
sistent but fair, determined, but with evident good 
will, quiet but resolute, not anxious to conceal the best 
in him any more than he is overeager to express it, 

124 



THE CHRISTIAN DUTY OF " FRONT " 

plainly not resolved to have more than he is entitled 
to, or even to push strenuously for all to which he is 
entitled, clearly more concerned about his duties than 
his rights, but as clearly not to be trifled with; let 
him add to this an air of erectness, alertness, alive- 
ness; and, other things being at all equal, he is going 
to get the best the world has to give. It will not open 
its treasure houses at once even to him, but it will 
open. Like a savage dog, it may greet him with a 
tentative growl, which it will repeat later, because, not 
having changed its disposition, it wants to see if he 
has changed his; but it will accord to his firm tread 
the right of way. 

The greatest effect of " front " is on the man him- 
self. It is astonishing how outward expression and 
posture affect inward feeling. This has been tried 
consciously ten thousand times, and unconsciously ten 
billion. The mere act of straightening the spine, 
throwing the shoulders up and back, raising the chin, 
and expanding the chest, not only allows the internal 
organs better play for digestion, respiration, circula- 
tion, but gives the whole man a feeling of strength, 
readiness, and competence, which no lopsided, stoop- 
shouldered laxling ever had. Assume the scowl of 
the malevolent, the sneer, the droop of the despondent, 
and we throw ourselves far in toward the actual ex- 
perience of these emotions. The smile of the assured 
or the benevolent, the clear-eyed alertness of the ready, 
the firmness of the determined, are equally at hand. 
Some who dread the dead-line of the ministry and of 
many another occupation to-day could postpone the 
evil day, not by the pathetic expedients of the dye- 

125 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

bottle and the tailor, but by a military " setting up 
process " of soul and body which clothes itself in the 
quicker motions, the swifter speech, the more mobile 
countenance, the readier smile, the alerter eye, of the 
youth we had no right to let slip. The cynic has it 
that a man is as old as he feels, a woman as old as 
she looks, and a minister as old as his young people 
think he is; but each of us, man, woman, minister, 
what not, is as old, strong, alert, victorious, as he 
" makes out," or " makes up " to be. The physician 
says a man is " as old as his arteries." Spirit knows 
no such limitation. He is as young as his faith in 
God, his will-power, and his " front." 

Is there not a good deal of hypocrisy, pretense, 
assumption about all this ? Something of that popular 
expedient known as " bluff " ? It must take a good 
deal of " face " to put on this " front "? If it is all 
front, yes. If there is no inner reality back of all 
this assertion, the fact will appear with appalling 
speed, and the poor wash of gold will soon wear away. 
Assumption must never reach the extreme of denying, 
with some modern faddists, the real facts of life, and 
especially to those who have the right to know them. 
One must not imitate the banker, who, knowing him- 
self to be already hopelessly insolvent, invites de- 
posits which simply pay his fare to Canada, or which 
are poured down the rat hole of the gambler's des- 
perate " sparring for time." 

But is this Christian confidence in front of life's 
situations anything like " bluff " ? That upright car- 
riage, that smile of assurance, that firm resolve, is true 
to the best in you. You have the power to be one of 

126 



THE CHRISTIAN DUTY OF " FRONT " 

a thousand possible men or women. This is the one 
you ought to be, the only right choice among your 
possible personalities. You are not that poor slink- 
ing, drooping, spineless thing. You do not have to 
be. God never meant you to be. You have no right 
to be. The only man you have a right to be, in justice 
to yourself, exclaims 

" What had I on earth to do 
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? 
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel? 

Being, who? 
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward ! " 

That quiet determined hopefulness till the battle is 
all fought out is only giving Providence a fair chance. 
The gambler " spars for time," hopeful of a lucky 
stroke, but the Christian fights on as one who 

" Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would win." 

His very courage, persistency and cheer, is his co-op- 
eration with God. He must not fail the great Co- 
worker. That is the evil of suicide and surrender; it 
puts one beyond the hope of rescue. And rescue, even 
triumph, can come so soon. One movement of God's 
hand, and the whole aspect of the battle has changed. 
How foolish to confess defeat when God is on the 
throne ! 

But whether the aspect of the battle has changed or 
not, God and his relations to right, truth, and those 
that trust him never have. In the light of that fact, 
this bold front is fully justified. You have a perfect 
right to the serenity and the smile. God is your 

127 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

Father, you are accepted in the Beloved, all things 
work together for good, — your boldness is not assump- 
tion of what is not yours, it is appropriation of your 
heritage in God, your right. 

And imperatively your duty. What business has a 
child of his to slander the Father by the drooping 
shoulder, the despondent eye, the surrendered skir- 
mish? Is not the Government on his shoulder, is he 
not guiding us with his eye, is not the whole battle in 
his hand? Shrinking is misrepresentation, backward- 
ness is disobedience, fear is unfaith. No front can be 
too bold for a son of God. 

" No, at noonday in the bustle of man's worktime 

Greet the unseen with a cheer! 
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
1 Strive and thrive,' cry ' Speed, — fight on, fare ever 

There as here!'" 



128 



XX 
MARTYRS WHO MISS THEIR CROWN 

'T V HERE are those who think they are martyrs, and 
■*• some who in a real and appreciable degree are 
martyrs, who are missing, in whole or in part, the 
martyr's crown. They are not reaping, from their 
fidelity or labor or testimony or suffering, the full 
glories they ought to gain. 

Life's trials and stresses and sorrows are not mar- 
tyrdom; they only furnish its arena, its opportunity. 
A martyr is a witness, one who in the face of and at 
the cost of sorrow, loss, anguish, death, bears testi- 
mony to the name and power, love and grace, of Jesus 
Christ. Merely experiencing pain or sorrow is not the 
essence and crown of martyrdom, for many have done 
that whose anguish was inarticulate of any message 
that told of Jesus. A sufferer may be only a victim. 
A victim is one who is hurt as a result of being in 
the path of destructive forces. Men are victims to 
typhoid fever, to the earthquake, to the ravages which 
the rum-traffic works even on those who had no share 
in its sin. Or a sufferer may be more than a victim, 
and be a sacrifice, conscious or unconscious, willing 
or unwilling, devoted to please or appease a deity or 
promote a cause, like the baby in the Ganges, or the 
company slaughtered for strategy. 

One becomes a true martyr only when he steps f or- 
129 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

ward or stands firm with a definite testimony of what 
he stands for, at the cost of stress and suffering. We 
often speak, for instance, of our " Martyred Presi- 
dents/' but only to Lincoln is the term at all accurately 
applied. Garfield's death, viewed from the human 
side, was a mournful accident, the joint product of the 
" spoils system " and political passions working on 
an evil heart and an unbalanced brain. McKinley 
was the victim of the social unrest, manifested in the 
desperate and dastardly act of one who was himself 
the victim of bad ideas and bad environment, while 
he felt himself a martyr to his principles. These no- 
ble presidents did indeed witness for Christ in their 
patience and resignation and faith, but that was inci- 
dental, not the cause and purpose of their pain. Lin- 
coln's death, unreasonable though it was, came as a 
direct result of his lifework, the price he paid for 
the cause he stood for; and yet even he was rather 
a victim to mistaken feeling, a sacrifice to the cause 
of national unity, than a deliberate witness in his 
death. 

But even fidelity is not the highest crown of martyr- 
dom, although it assuredly constitutes much of its sub- 
stance. One may give a clear testimony to the truth 
as it is in Jesus, submit to the last torture the per- 
secutors can inflict, go down unshaken to the grave, but 
lack in his crown the brightest jewel. For this jewel 
is the loving cheerfulness and triumphant faith that, 
at its brightest gleam, glories in the chance for sacri- 
fice, and in its steady, daily glow endures brightly, 
hopefully, willingly, the strains that come. 

" This is that " which sang with Paul and Silas in 
130 



MARTYRS WHO MISS THEIR CROWN 

the prison, shone forth in the jubilant martyrdoms of 
the early centuries, and in humbler, more ordinary 
service has sent the thousands inquiring for the 
Source of such gladness in conditions so adverse. 
Without this touch no martyrdom is complete. There 
may be gold in it, but its luster is feeble and its quality 
is mingled. 

One, for example, has been thrust into a situation 
which is a direct result of his service of truth or right- 
eousness. He offers a consistent testimony. He illus- 
trates the virtue of steadfast fidelity. But there is 
not much else that he illustrates. He does not illus- 
trate the resurgent power of Christian faith. No songs 
rise from his dungeon. The prisoners only wonder at 
the moans they hear. At the stake there is no " Father, 
forgive them; for they know not what they do." 
Rather he catches the firebrands as they come, flings 
them back, and gives them as good — and as bad — as 
they send. 

Another has undertaken a life of long and expensive 
witness for Jesus among the heathen, or on our fron- 
tier. He went into it with as pure a devotion, as 
complete a self-sacrifice, as warm a love as ever moved 
martyr or patriot. When it was entered into the 
great fact of the venture was seen, but its myriad de- 
tails were lost in the large " heroic stature " of the 
whole. Soon the business of translating heroic stature 
into homely service began, and by and by the little 
or great privations and lonelinesses and irritations 
inserted their stings, and roughened life's ways. The 
devotion did not go, the absorptive love did not die, 
but alas, — the little fine wrinkles of worry and care 

131 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

and temper, then even vocal and by and by vocifer- 
ous complaint, disguised the heroic face and voice, and 
the life became a witness to a theology, to a truth, 
to a task, but had ceased to be a witness to the large, 
loving, tender, triumphant Son of God and Son of 
Man. 

The difficult life of a mother, plainly sustained for 
the sake of Jesus and in the spirit of Jesus, can be as 
true and glorious a martyrdom as was ever witnessed 
by Stephen or Paul or Huss. Crosses and stakes and 
vats of boiling oil may call for no sturdier heroism 
and completer abnegation. God bless the mothers — 
Christ's martyrs of the home! No human heart can 
fully know, no tongue express, their heroisms ! Here, 
after all, and not in the rarer and more spectacular 
scenes of fidelity, is Christ's real power shown and 
glory won. In this case, too, there may be real devo- 
tion, sleepless vigilance, labor untiring, unrecompensed 
and without thought of recompense, the true spirit of 
him " who loved us, and gave himself up for us." 
But alas, again ! That mother's brow grows furrowed, 
her voice sharp, her words tart, she ceases to have 
time for the Scripture and the prayer, she is over- 
loaded by her cares. Then antagonism or slow aliena- 
tion grows up between her and those whom she loves, 
for whom she is giving her life, for whose soul's sal- 
vation she would, with Paul, if need be, barter her 
own — another martyr without a crown ! 

Not wholly. God is not unrighteous to forget such 
labor of love. Fidelity and witness are at the center 
of all real martyrdom. That mother did witness to 
love. She was faithful even unto death. Jesus never 

132 



MARTYRS WHO MISS THEIR CROWN 

fails to see, he never forgets that. He knew Thomas, 
that despairing lover with the torturing doubts, who 
saw only death before the living Jesus, and only death 
behind him who was the Risen One. " Let us also 
go, that we may die with him." Out of Christ's heart 
those words could never die. Thomas had the crown 
of fidelity. What Jesus wished he might have given 
him was the crown of faith. Jesus counts it much that 
we are true to him; but he counts it more that in our 
truth to him, we believe that he is true to us. 

For at its base, that is where a martyrdom loses or 
wins this crowning jewel. It was not, in the case of 
us Thomases, because our devotion failed, or our de- 
sire to do right, that we grew depressed or distorted 
or sour; it was because we failed to believe practically 
in Christ's presence and power, to realize him daily to 
our souls, to take him at his word, to draw on him for 
hourly strength and sweetness. Never mind why we 
thus failed; enough to say that we need not. For the 
upward gaze, for the believing heart, for the life that 
will take time to be holy, there are still always songs 
in the night, still the hymns of Paul and Silas prelude 
the shaking of the dungeon-house and the release of 
immortal souls. Still Jesus crowns his faithful ones 
with the coronet of others blessed and saved. " Let 
no man take thy crown." " Believe in God, believe 
also in me." 



133 



"OTHERS" 

" The Need of a World of Men for Me " 



135 



XXI 

SYMPATHY THE PROOF OF 
SPIRITUALITY 

/ T^HERE are those who appear to think that to be 
■*- out of patience with the average man or Chris- 
tian, keen-eyed to all his faults and incompleteness, 
conscious of superiority, assured that there is a great 
gulf fixed which he can hardly cross upward, nor you 
downward, is a sign that one has advanced far beyond 
his fellows on the road to spiritual knowledge and 
power. But in the midst of " holiness " such as this 
the original milk of human kindness has turned to 
vinegar, and ears once keen to all voices of love and 
longing cease to hear sweetness in the common speech. 
Tennyson suggests the fear that growing spiritual 
knowledge in his friend Hallam, gone before, should 
mean growing alienation, when he says, in "In 
Memoriam " : 

"An inner trouble I behold, 
A spectral doubt which makes me cold : 
That I shall be thy mate no more, 
Tho' following with an upward mind 
The wonders that have come to thee, 
Thro' all the secular to-be, 
But evermore a life behind ! " 

Yet neither the friend who longs need fear, nor the 
fancied spiritual aristocrat who despises need flatter 

137 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

himself. Spirituality means more understanding and 
deeper love, not less and shallower. The supreme 
test of the spirit is not our knowledge, nor our joys, 
nor our affinities, so fancied, but our sympathy, our 
power of appreciation, our entrance with love into our 
fellows' powers and needs, our discernment and ap- 
proval of the good in them. 

For the deepest and highest spiritual truths are 
merely growths from the simplest. Progress is not 
progress away from truths once known, but into them, 
into their depths. In the soul's first act of surrender 
and love are wrapped, as in the bulb, all the splendors, 
perfumes, and flavors of the flower and fruit that are to 
be. Heaven's most radiant blossoms are growths 
from the seeds planted and growing upon earth. The 
supremest secrets of the Spirit are present in germ in 
the first revelation of God's gospel grace to the new- 
born soul. That soul has but to follow on, to know 
all that man can know of the Lord. It could not be 
otherwise, since God and truth and love are one. If, 
therefore, you hold in your hand the truth in its 
simpler stage, you have the heart of the greater. And 
if that splendid flower you hold, that development of 
doctrine, that spiritual experience, that inner power, 
is of totally different species from the blossoms that 
grow on the lower levels, putting you out of connection 
and sympathy with them, you may be assured that 
what you have is of totally different species from the 
kingdom of heaven; your gorgeous, exclusive plant 
never came out of the celestial gardens. It is a wild 
outgrowth of your own imagination or of Satan's hot- 
bed of folly and pride. 

138 



SYMPATHY— PROOF OF SPIRITUALITY 

The deeper one pierces into the secrets of things, 
the more he gets into line with the real facts upon the 
surface. He will not reject that earlier truth. He 
only holds to it more firmly and sees more in it. He 
will not despise that other holder of it who has not 
advanced as far as he. He congratulates him on the 
progress he has made, and seeks to reveal to him the 
splendor that he himself has seen. The really pro- 
found scholar whose mind has continued to grow un- 
smothered by his knowledge and pride is not only 
never hostile or indifferent to the learner; he is at 
once more deeply interested in him, more at one with 
him, better able to measure his attainment, see his 
difficulties, and lead him on. He understands in 
germ and flower, top and bottom, height and depth, 
what others know imperfectly and insecurely. Better 
that scholar for a teacher than he who is but six 
months or six whole years in advance of his pupil. 
Better have Jesus for teacher than even John. It is 
not the holiest who despise the sinfulest. One may 
measure how far he has not climbed, by the distance 
and disgust he feels in the presence of his sinful 
brother. The nearer we get to God, the nearer are 
we to man. 

So far from meaning departure from the common 
truths or the common life, spirituality means more dis- 
cernment and more pleasure in these things. We are 
not less able to read our fellows, but more ; and it may 
be taken for granted that the further we can see into 
the minds and hearts of men, the more we shall see 
there that is good. True, finer spiritual apprehensions 
bring to our knowledge more and finer grades in 

139 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

spiritual quality. What was white once is seen now 
to be not so white. That must be true when we turn 
the glass upon ourselves. But when we turn it upon 
others, we see that what was black is not so black as 
it looked. Love taketh not account of evil, rejoiceth 
with the truth, believeth all things, hopeth all things. 
Believing in good, and hoping much from God, it sees 
great veins and lodes of noble possibility which other 
eyes cannot see. The man who is keen to discern 
evil in his fellow-men would do well to ponder the 
witch's saying in Macbeth : 

" By the pricking of my thumbs, 
Something wicked this way comes." 

It is the hidden affinity of evil, not of good, that 
apprises you of evil in him. 

Sympathy is the child of love. " Feeling for " de- 
velops into " feeling with." Without the first, the 
second never comes. It is love that gives the desire 
to discern. If I turn away disgusted from that fellow 
of mine because I am sure there is nothing in him I 
can find or develop, it is because there is nothing in 
me that wants to find or develop him. Indifference 
betokens not fineness, but feebleness, of feeling. Love 
it is that gives the power to discern. It is by love 
that we understand man. It is love which translates 
the prattle of that little child into speech articulate to 
the mother's heart. It is love that leans over the bed- 
side of the paralytic and pieces together the broken 
fragments of sound to make the message of that poor 
separated mind; love that catches the few faint points 
of moral aspiration and achievement in that chaos of 

140 



SYMPATHY— PROOF OF SPIRITUALITY 

a ruined life, and discerns the features of a son of 
God; love that watches the feeble groping after truth 
by the undeveloped Christian, reads what he is trying 
to discover and to say, fills out the incoherent story 
from his own treasure house of experience, and sends 
it back, a glorious revelation, to that struggling soul. 
If you cannot read your brother, if you do not want 
to read your brother, if your heart turns away dis- 
gusted from him, the Alpha and the Omega of spirit- 
uality is lacking in you. It matters little what you 
have learned, what you think you have grown to, what 
you have won; you have not discovered the greatest, 
nor won the summit. You have not grown up to love. 
You have faith, such as it is; knowledge, which shall 
be done away, but the greatest of these — is not yours. 
Who was it that understood the weakest human 
heart, that saw even the feeblest good in the sinfulest, 
that most tenderly and skillfully adapted his teaching 
to the most ignorant? Was it not He who felt most, 
knew most, was most, the summit of holiness and wis- 
dom? He who is most like Him is most spiritual. 
Between such souls and those who are below them 
there is no gulf which cannot be crossed. And that is 
happening in spirit which the poet describes in mind : 

"And what delight can equal those, 
That stir the spirit's inner deeps, 
When one that loves, and knows not, reaps 
A truth from one that loves and knows." 

Love, plus knowledge, is sympathy — and spirit- 
uality. 



141 



XXII 
THE TOUCH OF THE SUN 

/ T^HERE is a prevailing impression that the best 
-*- way to get at the ore of goodness in human 
nature is through pulverizers and crucibles. Some- 
times it is. There are ores that no other treatment 
will reduce, and neither man nor nature, apparently, 
has yet produced a diamond without enormous heat 
under intensest pressure. There are blossoms of char- 
acter which, like blossoms in the garden, thrive best 
in shade. 

Yet a man is neither a stone nor a plant. His vir- 
tues will not be extracted or compacted in spite of 
himself. He will yield them, or grow them, or produce 
them, by the output of his own vitality and will. 
Some solvent which will secure on his part a voluntary 
loosening of the bonds that unite his good and his 
evil, some stimulus which arouses his own inner ener- 
gies, is what he needs. Frost strikes many of us as 
furnishing such a stimulus, a most promising agency 
for ripening, strengthening, and beautifying character. 
Yet we may question whether frost is often more 
than a second-best method, used because the other has 
not been applied, or has not met response. The hard- 
est, strongest woods, the most gorgeous flowers, and 
the sweetest fruits are grown in the tropics. If we 
can get the gold in no other way, we may use the 

142 



THE TOUCH OF THE SUN 

crusher and the crucible. If nothing but frost will 
bring out the rich crimson, let the north wind blow. 
But, so far as we mortals are concerned, is there not 
a more excellent way? God knows when his fruits 
need the autumn, and when his ore needs the furnace. 
Let him manage those. It is safer for us to stick 
to the summer and the milder solvents. The real 
human thing that finds human gold, and extracts it 
when it is found, is a very sunny and pleasant thing: 
it is expectant sympathy. 

Sympathy is the key into life. Until we sympa- 
thize with this neighbor of ours, enter into his 
thoughts, desire the best in him and the best for him, 
exercise our loving imagination to see under his dross 
what is really gold, we are shut out of any treasures 
that he may have. We may be deceived, sometimes, 
by imagining choice metal where there is none, but 
we are much more likely to be deceived by failing to 
see it when it is there. If our sympathy is in good 
working order, by a sort of electric thrill the gold in 
us will signal its response to gold in him. If he dis- 
covers our sympathy — and how can he help it if it be 
genuine and strong? — then our discovery of him is 
tenfold easier. 

On the other hand, nothing so draws together the 
defensive leaves of that sensitive plant the human 
heart as hostility, or criticism, or even uncomprehen- 
sion. Men will not wear their hearts upon their sleeves 
for daws to peck at. They will rather thrust out a 
hedge of spears which utterly misrepresents them. 
Nor is this always a matter of will. They simply 
cannot reveal themselves. Something chokes them. 

143 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

Christ himself could do no mighty works' in Nazareth, 
because of its unbelief; and the feeble good in men is 
frozen at its source by arctic air. But when they can 
see in the eye, and hear in the voice, and feel in the 
hand, if not full comprehension, at least desire for 
comprehension, they open their hearts. We have en- 
trance, and can see all that is in the house, riches that 
no other ever saw. 

In this expectant sympathy is not only knowledge, 
but power. In the boat race in Vergil, it is said of 
one of the crews, " they are able because they think 
they are able" (possunt quia posse videntur). But 
might it not be translated, " they are able because 
they are seen to be able " ? Are not the shouts of the 
confident partisans along the shore at least as potent 
as the muscles of the crew ? " There is Emerson ! I 
like to see him stand up there talking about truth and 
right and virtue as if he believed we were all as good 
as he is ! " said one of his hearers. " Of course I 
succeeded ! " exclaimed Pasteur. " How could I help 
it, when from my earliest boyhood everybody ex- 
pected that I would succeed ? " When the flag goes 
up at Nelson's masthead, " England expects every 
man to do his duty," it will go hard but that every 
man will do his duty. There are those, it is true, who 
will not rise to this stimulus, and others whom it will 
stimulate only to lazy self-confidence; but then, not 
even the tropics can germinate a seed that is non- 
existent or dead. 

" Blessed are they that expect little," we say jocu- 
larly, " for they shall not be disappointed." Where 
such pessimists are the chief influence, verily they are 

144 



THE TOUCH OF THE SUN 

not very often disappointed. He who expects much 
is sometimes disappointed, but his gains far outweigh 
his losses. Mankind, taken as a whole, will respond 
like a spirited horse to the trust we put in it, and will 
reach or surpass the bounds we set, if we give it the 
cheering word. Who does not know someone, young 
or old, who in certain surroundings was a flat failure, 
but who, transplanted, began to blossom and bear 
fruit in a manner utterly unexpected by those he had 
left? That was precisely the reason: it was unex- 
pected. Underrated, discredited, viewed with sus- 
picion, prejudged, he could not bud and blossom in 
that chilly air. When he was brought where men 
believed in him, and showed that they looked for 
greater things, he felt the warmth and the sunshine, 
and he expanded. Cinderella became the princess. 
Love was the fairy godmother who renamed failure 
into success. " There are no bad plants," says Victor 
Hugo, " only bad cultivation." 

Of course it is from the sympathy that the expect- 
ancy gets its spring and power. Expectancy, alone, 
is often like the cold light of the arctics. The very 
sturdiest may be stimulated by it, but it may chill to 
death anything less. Luria, in Browning's tragedy, 
is a mighty spirit, and great things are expected of 
him, but he is tested to the utmost by the cold aloof- 
ness, the selfish detachment, of the men he is serving. 
The first step in the help that anyone can get from 
another is when he says, " He understands me." 
The second is when he says, " He believes in me." 
The third, which makes the others live, is when he 
says, " He loves me." In the helping soul the order 

145 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

is reversed. " I love him," is the first. " I under- 
stand him," is the second. And then, as surely as 
the night follows the day, "I believe in him"; for 
if we love and understand any soul on earth, we will 
believe in him. No one else may. We will. Knowl- 
edge fails. Wisdom fails. Love " never faileth; it 
taketh not account of evil, it rejoiceth in the truth, it 
beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all 
things." 

If we do that, and if there is any germ of good, by 
God's grace it will grow. That is the master secret 
of every great teacher, every great reformer, every 
great individual philanthropist. In Hezekiah's Song 
the text of our Standard Revision reads, " Thou hast 
in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corrup- 
tion." The margin and the Hebrew read, " Thou 
hast loved my soul from the pit." Love him out! 
This was the method of Colonel Pillsbury, who made 
his Albany penitentiary the gate of heaven into a new 
life for so many souls. His loving expectancy, his 
fearless trust in them, brought out the good, if there 
was any. It was Jerry McAuley's method, and 
S. H. Hadley's. It was Paul's. Have you thought 
of the tact that loaded Paul's lips or pen with com- 
pliments when he began a letter or speech? It 
was loving optimism, discerning the best in man, 
and seeking to make it blossom in the sunlight of 
recognition. 

Supremely was this the method of the Master. In 
this zone of perfect understanding, perfect love, and 
expectation, everybody who was not encased in Phari- 
saic pride or hate opened petals and expanded. The 

146 



THE TOUCH OF THE SUN 

hard-headed publican, the harlot even, the poor de- 
moniac, the impetuous Peter, the poetic John, — how 
that touch brought them all out ! 

Is there any good reason why this atmosphere 
should not prevail? It ought to be common, for it is 
normal. Sin is exotic. Hate and suspicion and ill- 
will are importations, — very early, it is true, but they 
cio not belong here. 

" This world is full of beauty, as unseen worlds above, 
And if we did our duty, it would be as full of love." 

But the love must bring out the beauty, not the beauty 
the love. 



147 



XXIII 

SYMPATHY'S GOLDEN GAINS 

C YMPATHY is a duty. It is not simply desirable 
^ that we should have the love that understands our 
fellow-men, but to God our Father and to men our 
brethren we are under obligation to have it. And it 
is as clear, also, that sympathy is power, the key into 
the hearts of men, the sunshine that develops the best 
in them. But we do not so often remember that, rich 
as is its fruitage for those upon whom it is exer- 
cised, its fruitage in those who exercise it is even more 
abundant, and more blessed. For sympathy, like 
mercy, is twice blest; it blesses him that gives and 
him that takes, but it blesses most him that gives. 
Shower its gifts ever so richly, and you get back more 
than you bestow. In this race you are forever worsted, 
— that is to say, bettered. 

The first abounding gain of such sympathy as this 
is in the acquisitions that come to us through our 
heightened powers of perception. These become the 
sensitive receiving apparatus of a spiritual wireless 
telegraphy, to catch the well-nigh innumerable mes- 
sages with which the world is pulsating, and which 
otherwise would be utterly unperceived. The man 
who has cultivated in himself the habit of trying to 
understand and comprehend and feel what his neigh- 
bors are feeling lives in a world of bewildering wealth. 

148 



SYMPATHY'S GOLDEN GAINS 

" I am a man, and I count nothing that is human as 
alien to myself," said the old Roman. If that had 
been true, then in due time all that was best of the 
human had come to him. These fellow-men of mine, 
often those who are apparently the poorest and the 
shallowest, have so much to give me! Their faith, 
hope, and heroism are being poured into me from 
the four corners of the earth. I was " sympathizing 
with him," I thought, — and felt a thrill of patronizing 
self-gratulation as I thought it; but he showed me an 
act, or a life, of such love, devotion, greatness of heart, 
as made me blush at my condescension. Much I may 
have given him, but he assuredly gave me more. And 
this is the law of the spirit : he who gives most, grows 
most. Wealth of mind and heart and spirit is propor- 
tioned precisely and inevitably to power and breadth 
and depth of sympathy. 

In this breadth of perception and widening wealth 
of experience we are all the while gaining increased 
power of perception. The trained senses of the expert, 
or rather his trained mind, — for it is not with the eyes 
but with the mind that we see, — is the wonder of the 
layman, yet it is nothing but intelligent and interested 
effort transmuted into habit, and that into an almost 
unerring perception and insight. It grows with the 
active years. What a priceless reward it is to find 
ourselves year by year able to read the better hopes 
and aspirations of men more and more readily and 
accurately! The cynic, no doubt, deepens his cyni- 
cism as he practices that, just as the microscopist can, 
if he will, see more defects as he gains more skill; 
but we can see more beauties. We can find more gold 

149 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

in the high-grade ore than we ever could before, and 
gold in ore seemingly so poor that it would have 
escaped us utterly last year. 

And not only find it, but get it. Every man must 
be conscious that his life has what the chemists call a 
definite reaction. He stimulates other men either 
weakly or powerfully, and either to good or to evil. 
It is this power in ourselves that our own sympathy is 
stimulating. We radiate spiritual wealth in the most 
blessed and effectual way, which consists, not in trans- 
ferring some of our own possessions over to him, but 
in calling out from him some of his own possibilities 
otherwise forever latent and therefore lost. The in- 
duction coil does not impart electricity, it simply calls it 
out. By exercise the magnet becomes more powerful. 
And we shall find ourselves more and more able, as 
the years go on, to draw out from our fellow-men the 
currents of truth, love, and life, where once our efforts 
would have been fruitless. How often that appears 
in the skilled and loving soul-winner, or the inspiring 
teacher! And the one secret of his increasing power 
is trained and strengthened sympathy. Every man 
rightly aspires to be a force. How blessed to be a force 
like that! 

For this means increase of what is the greatest 
power in all the world, the power of the heart-throb, 
human and divine, which is the root of sympathy. 
The intellect alone never produced real sympathy. 
The will alone never can. It is born of loving desire 
working with and in these. This is the power which 
most needs increase in this world of ours, and for 
whose increase in ourselves we can be most grateful. 

i. SO 



SYMPATHY'S GOLDEN GAINS 

There be those who protest that they " have too much 
heart." Possibly they have — for their own con- 
venience; but it will usually be found a case of too 
much surface sensitiveness and too little capacity for 
unselfish living; heart enough to feel, but not enough 
to love. True love is never afraid of heart-throbs, it 
covets them. There never yet was danger from, or 
of, heart hypertrophy. " Enlargement of the heart " 
is not a spiritual disease, but the antidote and a cure 
for most. 

This is the power reckoned highest in the kingdom 
of heaven. It was not Mrs. Browning's wide read- 
ing, for example, and reach of intellect, great as both 
were, that gave her place as a spiritual force, and on 
the spiritual summits of the ages. It was that power 
and willingness to enter into the sorrows and joys, 
needs and longings, of the slave, of the child, of the 
Italians among whom she lived so long, that heart 
whose strings vibrated with a responsiveness intense 
to the point of pain, to every throb of pain or joy that 
came to her perception. We are measured, not by 
what we know, or hold, or can, but by how we love. 

But the summit of these golden gains is found in 
the way we are brought closer in feeling and fact, in 
act and being, to our Master, which is the whole end 
and aim of our Christian life on earth so far as we 
ourselves are concerned. It is the goal of our effort, 
hope, and yearning that we shall be like him. And 
the road to that goal is by the path of sympathy. As 
we grow in heart-power we grow in power to under- 
stand him. None but the man who has watched the 
helpless, hungry multitude till he has felt the yearn- 

I5i 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

ing of Jesus to come to their help at any cost, is able 
to apprehend the real nature of Jesus. And no one 
can see him as he is who is not like him. None will 
deny that the one thing supremely characteristic of 
Jesus, the Son of God, is his sympathy. For that is 
what he is, God's incarnate sympathy, the power and 
willingness of God to enter into our every joy and 
sorrow, to accommodate those infinite activities to our 
slow or faltering paces, able and eager to deal gently 
with the ignorant and erring, yet able and ready to 
show the boldest wing that ever tried to soar its way 
to God a higher path than any it had dreamed. His 
sympathy is sympathy, not to the point of apprehen- 
sion only, nor even to absolute comprehension only, 
nor even to identification of feeling only, but to abso- 
lute surrender of self, " who loved us, and gave him- 
self up for us." This, and not his power or insight, 
or even his deity alone, if they could be alone, is his 
scepter over all hearts, his crown of glory. 

And if the crown of Jesus is sympathy, our sympa- 
thy finds its crown when it makes us like him. 



152 



XXIV 

SYMPATHY FOR THE STRONG 

QYMPATHY for the weak is a precious and late- 
^ won gain of our race. The first impulse of tame 
or savage animals and men is to " pick upon " the 
feeble or the crippled. Weakness invited oppression. 
To be " down " was pretty soon to be " out." But 
it is now an axiom of all self-respecting peoples, — 
still not too fully acted upon, yet advancing in power, 
— that " they that are strong ought to bear the infirmi- 
ties of the weak." Very beautiful are the multiplying 
instances of this in our hospitals, asylums, schools, 
protective laws, the gifts of the wealthy to the poor. 

This has been so hard to learn, however, that few 
have advanced to the next step, or dreamed that now 
and then it is a duty of the weak to bear the infirmi- 
ties of the strong. For the strong man does not seem 
to need it. He stands there sturdily supporting the 
mighty weight that rests upon him, or moves ahead 
with seemingly unwearied sinews, breasting waves 
that we feel we could not face, unshaken amid disas- 
ters which for us would break up all the foundations 
of things. We give him our confidence, our admira- 
tion, our envy even; but we never think of sympathy. 
Quite likely he never asks it. His pride may be too 
great, or it may be part of his task to maintain without 
a sign that sturdy erectness, that unmoved face. We 

153 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

are deficient in imagination, and the trials and sorrows 
and struggles of the heart beyond the mask we cannot 
even fancy. Perhaps we are simply selfish, and are 
willing to accept the results which bring us the bless- 
ing without too curious an inquiry into processes and 
costs. It may be that we modestly consider that our 
little help would be ineffective, our sympathy an im- 
pertinence. 

A little study of strength and of strong men will 
show how mistaken we are, and what a blunder, as 
well as what an injustice, we are committing. One 
will find from the look of an eye, a random word, a 
groan wrung out in the hour of agony, a confidential 
disclosure, even the anger or the jest which seeks to 
relieve an awful tension, that not only " the bravest 
are the tenderest," but that the strongest have most 
yearned for this strength that comes from the love and 
comprehension and longing of the neighbor heart. 
Elijah breaks under the thought that " I, even I only, 
am left." Paul's sensitive nature feels to the quick 
the departure of those who " love this present world," 
is refreshed even more by the practical sympathy of 
the Philippians, " thanks God and takes courage " 
when he sees the Roman brethren at Three Taverns. 
So with Luther : again and again the love of his friends, 
the courage of his wife, the power of God's Spirit, 
must fill the hungry heart and reinforce the strength 
of him who would face his duty " though it rained 
Duke Georges." And, supremely, the Son of man, 
bearing the infirmities of " them that were his own " 
as well as the indifference and hate of those who op- 
posed him, loved to lean upon the bosom of John, 

154 



SYMPATHY FOR THE STRONG 

and exclaimed with a heart-break as he woke the 
troubled sleepers in Gethsemane, " What, could ye 
not watch with me one hour ? " 

We may confidently reckon that where there is 
such strength there is such yearning, that the fountains 
which slake humanity's thirst themselves grow thirsty, 
too. It is true of many a helper of humanity, as Mrs. 
Browning sang of William Cowper, 

" O men, this man in brotherhood your weary paths beguiling, 
Groaned inly while he gave you peace, and died while ye were 
smiling." 

We may well question the reality of the strength un- 
derneath which there is no such longing. 

However godlike some men may seem and be, there 
are no longer any demigods, moving amid earthly 
needs and burdens with unearthly power at will. The 
Son of God himself, so far as his own needs were 
concerned, for us men emptied himself that he might 
share the real burdens, as well as " divide the spoil " 
with the strong. Your champion has no hidden source 
of power not available to other men. He does not 
meet the burdens and battles of life as the Roman 
emperor in the arena met the gladiators, — they armed 
with lath and he with steel. The giant load which 
the giant lifts calls for the same quiver of contracting 
and protesting muscle that we need when we lift our 
lesser one just within, but just up to, the limit of our 
strength. 

His demands, indeed, are proportionately greater. 
Somehow strains gather along the line of greatest 
strength. The greatest strength is won and held by 

155 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

the greatest struggle. Satan brings up his heaviest 
batteries before that point. God uses his choice 
servant for the work for which he is most fitted. We 
pile up our burdens on the most capable. Before we 
suspect it there is a mountain of responsibility, of 
trial, of temptation, pressing down on one poor man, 
while our sympathies go straying to some other part 
of the field. He may not break under the strain — 
and he may. Even though he does not, there often 
springs to his lips the desolate cry of David, " No 
man careth for my soul," or, "I looked and there was 
none to help. ... I have trodden the winepress 
alone." How much one word or look would mean 
to him! 

It is said that the Pilgrim Fathers had to endure 
the toils, privations, and dangers of pioneer New 
England, but the Pilgrim Mothers had to endure all 
these and the Pilgrim Fathers besides! Our strong 
man has to be strength, not only for himself, but for 
us into the bargain. The " care of all the churches " 
rests on Paul. Luther must uphold the Reformation. 
To be a prop is exacting enough, but your great man 
must be a propeller as well, and a fountain also. This 
weakness round about him is continually extracting 
strength. Whence shall he refill his fountains? 
At the ocean of divine energy, no doubt. But God 
has a way of making human sympathy the channel to 
his power. There is more than cold water in the 
cups men bring the prophets. It used to be said that 
the continued heat of the sun was from the impact of 
well-nigh numberless meteors falling steadily on its 
surface. No man can measure how much of the 

156 



SYMPATHY FOR THE STRONG 

abounding energy of some great spiritual sun, whose 
strength seems all his own, is due to the impact of our 
love and fellowship and words of cheer. The greater 
the sun, and the larger the sphere it floods with light 
and heat, the more it needs to have its inner fires 
perpetually renewed. If the great men are not made, 
they are assuredly maintained, under God, by us lesser 
men who " stand around them " and give them of 
our hearts for food. 

We have had a notion, not only that they did not 
need us, but that they did not want us. On the con- 
trary, if a man is truly great among men, a force to 
comfort, to empower, to compel in the direction of 
spiritual advance, it is by virtue of his own sympathy 
with them, his power to enter into their wants and 
needs, the yearning of his own heart to bless. He is 
great in proportion to his sensitiveness, his force of 
feeling, his force of outgo. Every cell of that heart 
which so freely sends forth its riches hungers for the 
arrival of like riches from his fellow-men. This love 
wants love back again. Love back again will stimu- 
late still richer floods from still deeper founts. What 
we get from him will be more precious than what we 
give, but that he must have. If that prophet of God 
has really been able to bring a blessed message to your 
soul, you can be sure that you have something for 
which his soul is hungering. It is not necessary at 
all that your gift should be as great, as choice, as rich, 
as his. Trust the alchemy of love and the Spirit to 
enrich and multiply what you bring; but bring it. 
The form is not the essential. What this man wants 

157 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

is the thrill of your comprehending love; the particu- 
lar wire along which it travels is of little moment. 

And once in a while forget all about his being strong, 
and remember only that he is a man, — needy, weak, 
tempted, longing for a human word of cheer. 



158 



XXV 
INSIDEDNESS 

QOME of us are marked by onesidedness, which has 
^ its advantages. Others, far fewer, have many- 
sidedness, which is admirable. But the quality that 
makes for real power is insidedness. How often we 
are struck by a grave lack in some otherwise com- 
mendable writing or speaking, and, worse still, in 
living, too. It is good, true, just, well put, but it wants 
a certain vitality, a compelling grip. It does not get 
hold of us. It did not well up out of the speaker's 
inmost soul with an impulse that could not be denied, 
and that brought up blood with it. It does not get 
inside of us, because it did not come from inside of 
him, and he had never been inside of it. 

Insidedness is necessary for reality. The person 
who moves us must not only mean what he says, he 
must know it; and not only know it, but feel it from 
the depths. There have been many pretty theories 
of the uses of affliction which one twinge of real pain 
in the theorizer sends flying. You ask the surgeon if 
a certain minor operation will " hurt." " No," he 
smilingly answers. And it doesn't — hurt him! One 
feels a little like that with certain mental comforters. 
This shining gold of spiritual gain which you say God 
extracts from our dross-ridden sorrows, — you tell me 
about it; but have you ever seen its color yourself? 

159 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

The simple personal testimony of even a smaller 
thing would help me more than all your rhapsodies 
of the spheres you have read about. 

There is no real life-power without this. People 
wondered for a long time why you could not put to- 
gether the precise ingredients of certain mineral 
springs and get the same results anywhere, and still 
more why the bottled water itself, away from the 
spring, was so markedly inferior. Then they dis- 
covered that as the water gushed up from its inner 
fount it was radio-active. The cunningest chemist 
could not put that in away from the spring, and the 
tightest bottles could not retain it long. Only experi- 
ence can put radio-activity into truth, and the most 
vital truth loses some or all of its power when it 
leaves the " original package." It cannot be " de- 
canted " very successfully. 

This is what makes the preaching or teaching or 
consolation of the young so shallow and so sapless. 
There may be no lack of intellect or of truth in what 
they say, no lack of real earnestness, or good-will, or 
love. We admire their fine enthusiasm, their zeal for 
the glory of God. It is refreshing to see them 

"So young, so strong, so very sure of God." 

But as they hand us their savory pottage, or sovereign 
remedy, we say with the hungry Isaac, " How is it that 
thou hast found it so quickly, my son?" and the 
taste and potency do not belie our wonder. It is the 
absence of this indispensable that neutralizes so many 
of the best cups of blessing which the so-called upper 

1 60 



INSIDEDNESS 

classes hold to the lips of their needy brethren. They 
never get on the inside, they never really let the others 
in; there is the outgo, of words, work, wish, or money, 
but not of life. The young and earnest student of 
sociology empties his pockets and dons overalls to 
understand the needs, problems, feelings, of the 
laborer out of work. But at any moment he can end 
his play-spell at work and want. He will never be 
on the inside till he gets where no telegraph can help 
him, and where it is work or starve, and the job for 
life unless he can work out of it. 

The very meaning and power of Christ's incarna- 
tion hinges on the fact that it was a sincere and real 
entrance into the actual conditions of humanity, its 
infirmity and limitations, tempted in all points like 
as we, made like unto his brethren. It was necessary, 
in his case, not that he should understand* us, but that 
we might understand him. He had always known and 
comprehended the pangs and sorrows and trials of the 
sons of men. But he needed really and evidently to 
share our sorrows by personal experience, that his 
words of faith and comfort and sympathy might have 
in our ears the ring of insidedness. The Christ who 
can really help must come with divine power and love, 
but he must come all the way in, must be one of us 
absolutely, truly, indissolubly : 

" He who did most, shall bear most ; the strongest shall stand the 

most weak. 
Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh that I 

seek 
In the Godhead." 

Insidedness is never cheap or easy. He who aims 
161 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

at it must make up his mind to stop short at no pay- 
ment that may be demanded, — and any payment may 
be. He will find himself often, indeed always, in the 
position of One of whom they said, " He saved others, 
himself he cannot save." 

That there must be deliberate effort of the imagina- 
tion to "put yourself in his place," needs no saying; 
and this takes the hardest sort of mental and heart 
work. No indolent thinker or listless lover can ever 
enter in. It is to be suspected that many of us are 
too lazy and too selfish to take the first step into the 
place of power. But actual intended contact with sor- 
row, suffering, trouble, sin, is indispensable. Some 
of us have hearts so tender that we really cannot bear 
to come into touch with pain. There are hospitals; 
we are willing to support them, but we prefer to keep 
away from them and work by substitute. But salva- 
tion comes not by proxy, but by proximity. Kipling 
put his finger on one great danger of our America, 
and our world, when he called attention to our 
charming suburban, restricted districts, with their 
sequestered quiet and " twirly whirly hoses," while 
the great seething slums a mile or two away are send- 
ing up their stench to heaven and stewing poisons for 
all the body politic. Cloistered sensitiveness that will 
not face need and sin, and plunge into their deeps, 
has no praise from God and no help for man. Slum- 
ming as a recreation may be tarred from the pit, but 
slumming as reconnoisance is heaven's searchlight into 
human need. 

" It will coarsen and blunt us, cheapen the world 
as a place of abode, rob us of a certain easy op- 

162 



INSIDEDNESS 

timism ? ' Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be 
wise ? ' " Well, if with familiarity with the less pleas- 
ant aspects of life comes a deeper pity for humanity, 
and a defter touch of healing on its wounds, the loss 
has been slight, and the gain has been infinite. The 
care-free ignorance of youth gives way to that sober 
coloring which life takes on from an eye that hath 
looked on man's mortality; but for the first time we 
see things as they are, and our real optimism and ex- 
pectancy and courage abide, for they spring from deep 
faith in God and knowledge of his grace. 

But real innerness goes much farther, to actual 
entrance for ourselves into the deeps of sorrow, strug- 
gle, pain. We may as well understand that we shall 
be shallow helpers until we have been deep sufferers. 
If we are to bring life to dying men, we must have 
felt the bitterness of death ourselves. This goes far 
to explain the manifold experiences of the choicest 
children of God. Like Job, they were tried that they 
might inspire others, and comfort their fellows with 
the comfort wherewith they had been comforted of 
God. " It became him, in bringing many sons unto 
glory, to make the author of their salvation perfect 
through sufferings." There was no other road to it, 
even for the Son of God. If we share in that glory of 
his, we must travel his path. 

Is insidedness worth its price? One who faces the 
demand for this quality in speaking, writing, living, 
may feel rise within him the question or protest: 
" Then I am asked for this service to coin my heart's 
blood, to distill for one draught or drop, ofttimes by 
the slow heats and pains of years, the richest depths 

163 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

of my being? " Precisely. Exactly that is the price. 
There is nothing that can help humanity but just that. 
Help comes by nothing else than the transfusion of 
blood, and the blood is the life. 

It all depends on what we value. If our aim were 
money, of course it is not worth it. For admiration, 
though many are willing to pay it, the price is far too 
high. Temporal power of almost any sort is pinch- 
beck exchange for this gold. But to bring comfort 
to a sore heart, joy to a darkened soul, courage to a 
beleaguered life, great strength to one who otherwise 
had fallen, perhaps forever, nothing in this world 
except the glory of God is so precious; and this is 
the glory of God. If we can compass these things by 
coining our heart's blood, let us thank God that we 
have blood to coin. When our soul has thus been 
made an offering for sin and sorrow, like the Master, 
we shall be satisfied, for we shall see our seed, we 
shall prolong our days, and the pleasure of the Lord 
shall prosper in his hand. 



164 



XXVI 
THE GRACE OF GRACIOUSNESS 

IVING is one long " give and take." We are al- 
*~* ways giving or receiving, making concessions or 
accepting them, winning victories or suffering defeats, 
or, as partners in the work of life, furnishing our 
share to the partnership, or receiving their share from 
our comrades. We can so play any or all of these 
parts that each transaction shall bring profit and pleas- 
ure to both parties, and be a splendid " bargain," like 
mercy, — " twice blest; it blesseth him that gives and 
him that takes." And with the grace of graciousness 
it will be so. For among all the flavors and fragrances 
of life, nothing adds to life's charm and pleasure like 
that which we call graciousness; and nothing can so 
render tasteless or even repulsive the choicest life as 
its absence or its opposite. 

But how ungraciously we sustain our roles! We 
give, — and give so grudgingly, or so patronizingly, or 
so triumphantly, or so clumsily, that it is like pelting 
a man with blessings; the sting of the giving robs the 
gift of its grace, and the receiver almost feels that he 
can never quite forgive the giver. Yet our very man- 
ner and spirit could have added to the gift its richest 
charm, which would have lingered after the gift itself 
had gone. And our taking is often as awkwardly or 
unlovingly managed. We receive almost as with a 

165 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

sense of injury, as if in a world of real justice the 
relations would be reversed, or as if somehow our in- 
dependence were assailed and our dignity insulted, or 
at least as though we were receiving no more than 
our just deserts, — and we rob the giver of that gen- 
erous pleasure which is his chief reward, and ourselves 
of that generous gratitude which is our chief blessing. 

How few of us, again, are able to make concessions 
or acknowledge defeat handsomely! It is with 
groans and grimaces, like a sulky camel, that we give 
up, if ever we really do. We could march out of 
our citadels with all the honors of war, flags flying, 
trumpets blowing, and in the moment of defeat van- 
quish our victor by our self-control and courage, and 
better, by the power of love. But we are twice 
beaten, once by him and once by our own sore hearts. 
Still harder to carry off well is victory. Each flash of 
our eye is an arrow in the heart of the defeated, and 
adds bitterness to his losses. Yet our part might be 
done with such gentleness, such tacit apology for tri- 
umph, such generous distress at his distress, such will- 
ingness to concede where we were under no obligation 
to concede, such good-will, such endeavor to ease his 
burden, that, like Lee whose sword Grant would not 
take at Appomattox, he, too, is twice conquered, once 
by our arms, and once by our heart. 

Even the more prosaic " give and take "of partner- 
ship is too often robbed of what might be a pleasure, 
and made to chafe and irritate. Half of the family 
jars, the church disagreements, the class difficulties, 
are utterly needless. A drop of the lubricant of 
graciousness would remove the friction, prevent the 

166 



THE GRACE OF GRACIOUSNESS 

heat, suppress the shriek. For in most of these cases 
there is no real desire to injure or to withhold. The 
actors are really one, and perhaps in their heart of 
hearts are willing to die for one another ; but they have 
not learned the fine art of living for and with one 
another. It was a little roughness that made the " hot 
box" which brought the whole train to a standstill; 
an atom of oil would have prevented it. 

The real charm of life is never seen until one has 
felt the touch of a spirit who has this flavor of 
graciousness. It becomes the throned monarch better 
than his crown. It is his crown. A refusal from him 
is pleasanter than a favor from some others, and the 
smallest or simplest act of kindness becomes fragrant 
with benediction. Even the plausible counterfeit of 
this grace in the superficial courtesies and amenities 
of social life gives a charm which is worth all it costs, 
and gives the lie to the notion that rough and ready 
bluntness is necessarily a sturdy and valuable virtue. 

But graciousness is a grace, not one of the " airs 
and graces." The society woman may school herself 
to self-control and the pleasant look and smile in all 
circumstances, " mistress of herself, though china 
fall," but the robe is thin, and life's friction may 
wear it to shreds, or some untoward breeze may 
brush it aside. The real graciousness is deeper and 
more enduring. It is a virtue exercised, not a virtue 
assumed. It is a grace, a real achievement of the 
Spirit of God in the heart and life of man. 

When we analyze the ungraciousness that deprives 
and embitters and irritates, we see that it is com- 
pounded of forces and tendencies deep in the sinful 

167 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

human heart, which " grace " must conquer. Our 
ungraciousness in giving springs from pride, or from 
the covetousness of possession, or from sinful lack 
of sympathy and imagination. Our receiving is un- 
handsome because we are deficient in love, and are 
full of that sour pride that finds it hard to acknowl- 
edge a favor. The triumph that rankles is the child 
of overgrown self-love or ungrown love for others. 

The ancestry of the grace of graciousness is not 
hard to trace. One has but to go through a few verses 
of the thirteenth of First Corinthians and substitute 
a word here and there : " l Graciousness ' suffereth 
long and is kind; 'graciousness' vaunteth not itself, 
is not puffed up, . . . seeketh not its own; . . . be- 
lieveth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all 
things. ,, It is simply love in exercise, love that speaks 
in the eye, thrills in the hand, caresses on the tongue, 
blossoms in the life. It is a grace imparted, for it can 
come only from a heart filled with the Spirit of God; 
otherwise it is either counterfeit or shallow. But it is 
a grace which must be exercised. It will not come 
involuntarily. It needs incessant practice. We must 
school ourselves to this thoughtful love, this interest 
in others, this whole-hearted delight in their good 
and happiness, this willingness to express. It has to 
be willed, many times, when inclination is against it. 
It is to exercise in look and word and act the abundant 
good-will toward men which we have learned of the 
Master. It is, in daily life, in face of the daily demand, 
simply to " put on the Lord Jesus Christ." 



168 



XXVII 

THE PENALTIES OF THE SEAT OF 
THE SCORNFUL 

'T^HE materials for scorn are near at hand and in 
■*- great abundance. The frailties of our fellow- 
men, slight or great, are very many, and so are our 
own virtues, which shine in our eyes so resplendently 
by contrast. Though an unheavenly feeling of satis- 
faction in another's shortcomings may not come prom- 
inently to the surface, and even may not exist in many 
of us, yet among men and women who have righteous 
instincts and an admiration for perfection scorn is 
likely to have an appeal peculiarly strong, because then 
it masquerades as righteous indignation, which is a 
sentiment of God. It is hard to tell, unfortunately, 
just how much of this is made up of our own sense 
of superiority, ill-nature, and pride, and just how 
much is real and glowing love for the good and hatred 
of the evil. It is a very safe thing to adopt the 
Scripture motto, even when our indignation flames at 
some particularly flagrant ineptitude or iniquity, and 
" give place unto the wrath of God, for it is written, 
Vengeance belongeth unto me; I will recompense, saith 
the Lord." We must not be laxly indifferent to evil, 
but we are not usually God's appointed executioners, 
either with the sword of temporal justice or the thun- 
derbolts of moral wrath. 

169 






THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

Scorn is a habit to which the reformer, or one who 
has reforming instincts, is especially prone. Conscious 
of his own high purpose, seeing sun-clear his own 
noble aim, for which he is ready to sacrifice ease, com- 
fort, wealth, and even life itself, he encounters the 
blindness, sluggishness, selfishness, cowardice, and 
even hypocrisy of men. His soul is hot within him as 
he sees them rejecting God's call to service. His heart 
is wrung at sight of the ravages wrought by the evil 
he combats. Insensibly, he begins to despise these 
men of little insight, or little faith, or little courage, 
or little virtue. He sees, as he thinks, that they make 
up the majority, and he begins to lean over toward 
general misanthropy. Let him beware! He has 
begun to form the habit of scorn, and it is exacting 
its sure penalties of him. 

Scorn is evil in its effect on those on whom it falls. 
It is oxygen to the answering hatred it evokes, and 
nitrogen to the love, the kindliness, the aspiration, of 
those who are its objects. A hardy soul, indeed, is 
it that can flourish in this atmosphere; an opulent 
and loving soul, with deep inward sources, whose 
milk of kindness is not turned at least to answer scorn 
with scorn. But like all feelings, good or bad, its 
chief effect is upon him who cherishes it. There are 
few blights like that which settles on those who sit in 
the seat of the scorner. It is withering to the soul. 
It smothers the nobler feelings while it is stimulating 
the unlovely ones. The spiritual pride it engenders 
is offensive to God and man, and dangerous to its 
possessor. Phariseeism cf the most virulent and yet 
unconscious sort, it hides from the man his own true 

170 



THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL 

condition, and encourages him to send forth such evil 
branches and blossoms, to excuse himself in such 
attitudes, practices, or even vices, as are often worse 
than the evil he condemns. And even though he may 
be saved from any such open and flagrant outward 
sin, there is engendered in his soul a bitterness which 
turns to gall whatever comes into his mind. His 
habitual emotion is contempt, and contempt is not far 
from hatred. To become a soul of vitriol is perhaps 
scorn's deepest penalty. 

There are many other penalties. There is the scorn- 
er's failure to get the best out of his fellow-men. He 
has so accustomed himself to detecting evil odors that 
he misses all the perfume. The perfume is very 
sweet and very abundant. It is astonishing what an 
enormous amount of good there is in people who in 
some ways are just objects of condemnation. Even 
in rainy Ireland there are in every year one hundred 
and sixty-five days when it does not rain. How mis- 
placed and misused is the moral and spiritual keen- 
ness which is employed in discerning defects instead 
of excellencies, and how the scorner, under the guise 
of righteous indignation, robs his own heart ! 

More serious, it may be, is the tendency to set us 
apart from, or in open opposition to, the great bulk of 
our fellows, and so, in fact, to sever us from connec- 
tion with the great currents which are sweeping the 
world along. For while at the beginning of any re- 
form, and often for a long while after, only the few 
march to the new music and the many are out of tune, 
yet the great movements are in the end those of the 
majority. It is the general heart that moves onward 

171 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

into light. It happens with this man, however, that 
he has the habit of disagreement, and he is bound to 
march with the few under any circumstances. He is 
permanently "in the objective case." Like Walter 
Savage Landor on one occasion, when he obscurely 
caught the purport of a statement, he shouts out, " I 
object to it entirely, Sir ! What was it you were say- 
ing? " He has gotten out of gear with humanity; he 
is a mere brake, a sea-anchor, to retard its progress. 

This is no fancy picture. It has happened to 
more than one earnest reformer and noble soul. He 
began by being a prophet of God most high; he ended 
by being a common scold. He began as a pioneer 
and guide of humanity far in advance of it; he now 
drags far in the rear, seeking to hold it back. If he 
had kept his eyes open to the good, if he had steadily 
recognized that while the head of humanity may be 
wrong, and its heart to-day not strenuous enough for 
good, yet its instincts are for the right, and God is 
working with it; if he had sought to see the elements 
of truth in the movements outside of his own, he 
would not thus have been lost in shallows and in 
miseries, but would have known how to take the cur- 
rent when it served and be borne on to victory. Could 
anything be sadder than to see that old prophet 
stranded on the shore of uselessness, railing at the 
rising tide which is sweeping on to accomplish the 
very things which are nearest to his deepest heart? 
Scorn did it. 

And in this condition, unhappy, bitter, convinced 
that the world is all wrong, the man is often the easier 
prey of, some fad or fancy which may be. sweeping the 

173 



THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL 

unthinking into absurdity and error. Once he would 
have been a rock against its influence. But he is now 
permanently in the opposition, and whatsoever is of 
the opposition is therefore right and true. He has 
nothing now to balance over against his own opinion 
and that of the little sect that now enchants him; 
he has so long held the opinion of the majority 
of little worth that his thought has no ballast or 
rudder. 

And scorn may work a deeper injury than any of 
these; it may get us out of sympathy with Jesus 
Christ. Indeed, he who scorns is already out of sym- 
pathy with the Master of men. Jesus knew right- 
eous indignation; he did not know scorn. There was 
in him none of that self-righteousness, that contempt, 
that sour delight in others' faults. He denounced, 
and not without sarcasm, but he loved while he did 
it. That is an achievement so difficult for us that it 
will be wise for us to confine ourselves to one phase 
of the process — love. His example is worthy, but 
our powers are small. Assuredly, he who sees faults 
and not virtues, who dwells on evil and not on good, 
who despises instead of loving, and almost hates him 
who disagrees or who is disapproved, has drifted away 
from Christ. There is little fellowship between the 
two. The nominal connection may not be severed — 
and sometimes it may. He may keep his outward 
religious service; his faith may have suffered no 
eclipse; his heart's purpose may be as true as ever. 
But as certainly as love and hate are antipodes, this 
man is following his Lord afar off. The tender, sat- 
isfying, thrilling presence of Jesus his Lord, the lov- 

173 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

ing Christ, is not his, for how can two walk together 
unless they be agreed ? 

This is a painful picture, but is it not a faithful 
picture? Some of its details may be found in the 
life-history of all men, and all of its details may 
be found in the life-history of some men. This 
is the goal toward which we take the first steps when 
we begin the habit of scorn. We may never fully 
reach it. God grant we never shall. But why should 
we move even a step toward it? The remedy is not 
far to seek, although it will take much effort to apply 
it. A heart which counts others better than itself, 
which resolutely sees good as well as evil, which reso- 
lutely sees only good where seeing evil will do no 
good, which wishes only good things to its fellows, 
which is so aware of its own shortcomings that it has 
no time or energy or disposition to criticise others, 
which keeps in close touch with the loving heart of 
Jesus Christ, — that heart will never be bound in the 
chains of the habit of scorn. It lives in the thirteenth 
of First Corinthians. It will reap to the human full 
the beatitudes : " Blessed are the merciful : for they 
shall obtain mercy." 



174 



XXVIII 

THE IMPOSTURE OF "APPEAL" 

"TT\OES it ' appeal ' to me?" is a favorite test with 
•**r a good many of us. We feel that we have 
within us a surer test than any outward standard, in 
our own instinctive attractions or repulsions. " That 
does not appeal to me," we say of a cause, and in an 
instant this becomes a final reason why that cause 
should go on without help from us; of a doctrine, 
and, as if forever classified by an unfailing touch- 
stone, that doctrine is to us as if it were not; of a 
person, and he is at once shut out of our thoughts : he 
is as a heathen and a publican. 

There is a show of reason in this. The greater the 
unforced fervor with which we espouse a cause, the 
more effective, perhaps, our aid will be. If a teaching, 
however backed by ancient or weighty names, does not 
find response in our own thinking or thrill our 
deepest fibers, it can have little power in us or 
through us. 

Nevertheless, this deference to " appeal " is too 
often a lazy, feckless, ne'er-do-weel notion, a sop to 
inclination, indolence, and indifference. It is likely 
to mean shallowness in thought, dullness in feeling, 
and selfishness in act. It is often a robber of the first 
rank. On its account, movements which deserve every 
throb of sympathy, and every ounce of strength we 

175 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

could command, fail of our aid. It shuts us out of 
the widest and highest reaches of truth. It robs us 
of many of the sweetest fellowships life could offer. 
And by it some of the purest and strongest souls who 
have blessed the world have been kept from that 
strength and blessing of sympathy which was their 
hunger and their due. 

Its basal error lies in thinking that our part in the 
world is to be acted upon rather than to act. It is 
not our business to retire within the inner fortress of 
our lives and decide whether certain things bring 
against us batteries of appeal weighty enough to force 
us to let them in, nor even to stand at open outer gates 
ready to admit them if they answer certain tests we 
find registered in our feelings or our prejudices. Our 
part is an aggressive one, to use or affect for the better 
whatever we touch, and to touch whatever we can, in 
view of all life's thronging duties. The prime ques- 
tion of life is never what appeals to us, but to what 
can we apply ourselves, with all our powers, so as to 
draw from it strength and beauty for others, or bring 
it into accord with the purpose or pattern of God, or 
aid it in its work. 

Whether a matter now appeals to us is our smallest 
concern. Ought it to appeal to us? Will it appeal 
to us when we know more about it ? The things that 
most deserve assent and assistance are not always 
those that get them. Whether an answer of mind 
and heart shall be awakened usually depends upon 
how things look on the surface, and what knowledge, 
what principles or prejudices, what insight, what 
esthetic or moral " tastes " are found in us. If a 

176 



THE IMPOSTURE OF " APPEAL " 

cause, for example, is championed by men we have 
been led to think narrow or ill-balanced, its appeal is 
discounted at once. But almost always the necessi- 
ties of reform either call for a certain rugged type, or 
produce it. Revolutions are not wrought with rose- 
water. Not all wisdom's children recognize each 
other. The best Roman emperors, whose moral 
ideals approached most closely the Christian code, 
were the sternest enemies of the new faith. They 
mistook its fervor and unworldliness for wild fanati- 
cism and "hatred of the human race." In its lowly 
adherents and strange doctrines there was nothing 
that " appealed " to them, and they never knew the 
real beauties of the system they spurned. 

Mere esthetics sway more people than would be- 
lieve it of themselves. Picturesque reforms and 
philanthropies win hearts which undecorated truth and 
right are powerless to move. When a childless hus- 
band and wife seek in an orphan asylum an object 
of love and care, it is not " blear-eyed Leah " who is 
chosen, although she may be the needier soul and 
the lovelier character. Imagination and fancy, not 
reason and conscience, too often cast the deciding 
vote. 

And very frequently our sheer ignorance is the 
mother of our failure in response. Certain claims 
have not had, or been allowed, the chance to sink 
into mind and heart. One visit to the moral sewers 
of our great cities, one tour through the factories 
where the bodies and souls of childhood are bartered 
for a price, one fair examination of the evils of the 
saloon, would make enthusiasts of men and women 

177 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

who now look on with cold indifference. Not " appeal 
to you " ? One " could a tale unfold " of any one of 
a halfscore of reforms, which would thrill you to a 
fever of interest and indignation. Facts could be 
given concerning this man or that woman which 
would make you grapple them to you with hoops 
of steel. " Surely Jehovah is in this place, and I 
knew it not.'* But it is our business and duty to 
know. 

Rarely does the best in life lie on the surface. 
Many of the truest characters are less pleasing on first 
acquaintance than some who have assumed a veneer 
of pleasing manner or bred in themselves a genuine 
but shallow good-nature. John Knox never could 
win the friends who flocked round Mary Stuart. Such 
souls hide their treasures. The best in them, as in 
anyone, must lie far within. What " appeals " most 
strongly at first sight is more usually the less worthy. 
Quartz glitters in all the glory of flawless texture 
and perfect facets, while the rough diamond looks like 
a pebble or lump of gum arabic. The wealth of any 
science or study is to be seen or enjoyed only after 
arduous search and toil. It is to be extracted by none 
but those who recognize its possible value and bring 
to it their own " chemicals " to reduce and refine it. 
Truth's richest food is never furnished predigested. 
How utterly absurd is this test of spontaneous " ap- 
peal"! 

Before we accord decisive weight to the verdict of 
our first impressions, it might be well to know whether 
our own moral and spiritual state, our grade of ad- 
vancement, is such that we are good judges of any 

i 7 8 



THE IMPOSTURE OF " APPEAL " 

teaching, or cause, or person. Macaulay's Otaheitan 
cast one careless glance at the stately front of St. 
Paul's, and ran into a shop to play with beads. " We 
shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he 
is," has a reverse. " We shall see him as he is when 
we are like him. ,, Within the two great classes of 
men, the " spiritual " and the unspiritual, there is al- 
most an infinity of grades, and each will see only what 
he can see. Truths which once stirred every fiber 
have lost their grip because the man has lost his grip 
on the great realities. When one is very sure that 
" the revival has passed," perhaps it has passed — from 
him. And many a teaching which was cold, empty, 
even repulsive, to one who had not climbed up to it, 
glows like the cathedral windows now that he has 
mounted and entered. It was said of one distinguished 
orator, after a supposed moral lapse, that " he had 
abolished hell in self-defense." There are those who 
deny heaven, because they have not entered its earthly 
anterooms. 

The best use of " appeal " is in its test, not so 
much of the things which ask our support, as of us 
who sit in judgment. Not Christ is being judged, 
but Pilate. " Here," said Thomas Carlyle to a num- 
ber of art-lovers who had each been mentioning 
another " fact about Titian," " here's an immortal soul 
who does not care that about Titian. There's another 
fact about Titian." 

" No," said his friend, " that's not a fact about 
Titian. It is a fact, and a lamentable fact, about 
Thomas Carlyle." Appeal is appraisal — of ourselves. 

Our business is not to be appealed to, but to apply. 
179 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

If we test, we test only that we may extract, trans- 
form, or assist. If, after genuine effort, these prove 
impossible, it will be time enough then to pronounce 
our verdict. Until then, it is lazy, blind, conceited, 
and sinful to say very much about " appeal." 



180 



XXIX 
THE BLESSINGS OF INERTIA 

TNERTIA is pretty nearly as exasperating as incon- 
■*• sistency, which it closely resembles. You keep 
firing the hot shot of your truth into the slow minds 
of men with about as much apparent effect as had 
the musketry fire of the Civil War, when, it was 
said, it took a ton of lead to kill a man. And when, 
after long and strenuous endeavor, you are sure that 
they not only ought to be convinced, but are, and you 
turn your guns elsewhere, feeling that the battle is 
won, and that your truth now accepted will make its 
own way, you are astonished to look back, a month, 
a year later, and find everything just where and as it 
was before. You have poured your energy down a 
rat hole. You are inclined to charge your fellow-men 
with glaring inconsistency. It looks extremely as if 
various interlocking and complicated forces had 
clamped these people down to that anchorage of non- 
progression. There must be prejudice there, timidity, 
pride, avarice, ambition, and probably mulishness. No 
doubt this is partly true, for human motives are seldom 
unmingled; but the force that is chiefly troubling you 
is not inconsistency, nor dishonesty, nor selfishness, 
but a certain admirable thing which is the condition 
of all real and permanent progress. Recognize it, 
understand it, and utilize it, and you can make it serve 

181 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

magnificent purposes in the advance and establishment 
of the race. It is inertia, without which stability is 
impossible and force is inconceivable. 

Inertia is that universal property of matter by which 
it tends to continue in the same state of rest or motion 
in which it is. If it is at rest, inertia requires that 
force be exerted to move it. If the object be in motion, 
force must be put forth to stop it. The amount neces- 
sary depends upon the mass or weight of the body, 
and the rapidity with which it moves or is desired to 
move. "Large bodies/' we say, "move slowly"; 
that is to say, they get slowly to moving; but when 
they are in full swing arrest is hard and slow. Minds 
have what might be called bulk, weight, and speed, or 
energy; and every mind most emphatically has iner- 
tia, the property of keeping on as it is unless some 
adequate force produces a change. It will not respond 
to a mere order of somebody's will, somebody's else, 
or the man's own. It proposes either to " stay put " 
or keep going until something changes its status. We 
are chafing against the nature of things when we chafe 
against inertia. 

And against a tremendously useful thing, too. In- 
ertia has a wonderfully valuable educational and gym- 
nastic effect on the man who is seeking to move 
things. It seems to him only a stubborn and unrea- 
sonable antagonist. " Why, oh why, when every- 
thing is proven and the ' Q. E. D.' has been said, 
why not be able to move on the practical or logical 
vStep that follows ? " Well, such is human nature that 
it is rarely good to get things as quickly and easily as 
that. A victory so lightly won would be lightly held. 

182 



THE BLESSINGS OF INERTIA 

" Nawthin' cost, nawthin' vally," was the Yankee 
explanation of the fewness of the local visitors to the 
mountain glories that tourists sought from the ends 
of the earth. God has placed the best things in life 
beyond our present reach, that the toil may stimulate 
our appetite and our appreciation. But the exercise 
we get out of it is even a more valuable element. 
Without inertia, gymnastics could not be. The row- 
ing machine, the horizontal bars, the swinging rings 
are devices for pitting muscle against the allies, gravi- 
tation and inertia. It is in the battle that muscle gets 
its girth. If in the moral world results came too 
quickly, life would lose its chief gain. Easy victory 
would engender conceit, imperiousness, impatience. 
As it is, persistence, patience, tact, faith, and love get 
abundance of exercise. One of the facts that puzzle 
some of us is that the men and women upon whom 
God has laid the glorious burden of some great enter- 
prise of the kingdom have to bear also the burdens of 
the indifference and sluggishness, to say nothing of 
the opposition, of the " rank and file." But God is 
almost or quite as much interested in the growth we 
get out of doing things as in the growth others get out 
of our doing them. We can see the good of this 
struggle with the sloth once in a while, when some 
enterprise has easy sailing, " waxes fat," " settles on 
the lees," and " kicks." It is clearly divine wisdom 
that only through much pushing we get things to 
moving. 

These provoking waits also provoke to reflection. 
Jefferson, standing before the fireplace, illustrates the 
function of the Senate by the saucer in which his tea 

183 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

is cooling. There be those who might aver that in 
the light of history a chafing-dish were a better simile. 
So, in instances, with inertia. But it is often ex- 
tremely fortunate that matters cannot be hurried be- 
yond a certain speed. The measure which cannot 
endure considerable delay is more than under sus- 
picion. Whatever bids us " bide a wee " is a friend, 
provided we do not bide too long. It takes time for 
tendencies to reveal themselves. The best " prophet " 
cannot forecast them all. Even though caution has 
no word to say for itself, no reason to advance except 
its own ingrained habit, it often halts us at the edge 
of a precipice; and though this time there proves to 
be no precipice, nothing has been lost by delay. 

Inertia is absolutely indispensable to real stability 
and real power. If things responded to a feather 
touch of ours, we could expect them to respond to a 
feather touch of somebody else. The mercurial peo- 
ple who yield to every breeze are not very valuable. 
It is very exasperating that humanity has to wait so 
long before my reason and heart and will can propel 
it my way, or get it to stop where I direct, but that 
very " obstinacy " assures me that it will keep going 
with effect when I do get it started, or will stay where 
I place it. The experienced teacher sees with a tem- 
pered joy how quickly the mind and feeling of that 
bright boy respond to his stimuli. He fears he may 
see the fire die out as soon. Often it is with a certain 
dogged hopefulness that he sets himself to hammer 
at that other slow-moving consciousness, pretty sure 
that what he gets will abide in permanence and power. 
" Little pot soon hot " and soon cold. " Straightway 

184 



THE BLESSINGS OF INERTIA 

they sprang up, because they had no deepness of earth, 
and when the sun was risen, they were scorched, and 
because they had no root, they withered away." 

Inertia is God's method of storing power. Unless 
the object is really clamped down — as some people 
are, alas — every ounce of power you put into it is re- 
leased by and by in the form of energy or deposited 
in the form of stability, if you have kept at it contin- 
uously enough and long enough. You may be getting 
" hot " at the necessity of pounding, but the iron is 
getting hot too. There is a certain stage when the 
intense and incredible activity of childhood is suc- 
ceeded by an almost insuperable inclination for loaf- 
ing and lounging. Science now tells us that the lazi- 
ness of the poor white is due not to the microbe of 
indolence, but to a parasite that saps the strength. 
She has rehabilitated the reputation of the growing 
boy by assuring us that the reason for this period of 
unlimited food consumption, in inverse proportion to 
his willingness to be put to any form of useful labor, 
is that he is absorbing energy. This slowly moving 
mind of the body politic is certainly absorbing your 
energy at a tremendous rate, and to small apparent 
purpose. But as you work with God, " in due season 
you shall reap if you faint not." Like the hundreds 
of heat units that have to be poured into the water 
at two hundred and twelve degrees before its particles 
will break the bands that hold them together as water, 
and burst into steam, your thousand hours or days 
or years of prayer and effort and influence and prepar- 
ing for God's glorious " one day " of abiding result, 
nor has one hour been lost. " Wherefore be ye stead- 

185 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

fast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the 
Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not 
in vain in the Lord." 

Are there some counterfeits of inertia where lazi- 
ness, or prejudice, or sin has clamped the soul, so 
that in that case our labor is in vain? Undoubtedly. 
Are some souls so light that they cannot absorb our 
energy? Hardly, though there is vast difference in 
the weight of souls. But while even with wisely 
placed, love-directed, spirit-filled labor not all effects 
are equal, the net result shall not fail. Our chief care 
is to keep everlastingly at work, persistently, unre- 
mittingly, with him. Inertia is no antagonist. It is 
our banker, after God; and, under God, our chief 
ally. 



186 



EPILOGUE— BASE AND PINNACLE 



187 



XXX 

CHILDLIKENESS OR CHILDISHNESS? 

" T? XCEPT ye turn, and become as little children, 
■*— ' ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of 
heaven. ,, More classes than one are repelled by this 
saying of the Master. Proud young minds, sturdy, 
self-reliant natures, and older ones, conscious of the 
larger growth and gains of maturity, are apt to feel 
that it is a narrowing demand, it is asking the cur- 
rents of life to flow backward. However much, in 
some hours, our hungry and lonely hearts may long 
for some things childhood had, 

"Backward, turn backward, O Time! in your flight, 
Make me a child again, just for to-night ! " 

we feel is a request as unworthy as it is unattainable. 
" When I was a child, I spake as a child, I under- 
stood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I 
became a man, I put away childish things." And so 
many, both young and old, revolt from this demand 
of Jesus, but they revolt because they misunderstand 
it. They confuse two things that are profoundly dis- 
similar. They confound childishness, which Paul de- 
nounces, with childlikeness, which Jesus demands. 

Jesus does not insist that we become little children. 
That would contravene his own laws of growth: 
" First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in 

189 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

the ear." And the process is inconceivable without 
mental mutilation and intellectual suicide, — is incon- 
ceivable with them, for, if one should attempt to carve 
down a full-grown man to the proportions of an infant, 
he would have neither man nor child as the resultant. 

But Jesus did insist that we become as little children, 
assuming not all the characteristics of childhood, but 
certain admirable ones which add strength and beauty 
to any stage. 

Childlikeness is the loftiest attainment, the deepest 
strength, the highest charm, of Christian character. 
The soul which has arrived at it has not merely en- 
tered the door of the kingdom of heaven, he has not 
merely the germs of all development in him, and in 
his hand the key and clew to all advance, but he is far 
on his way into its deepest heart, — he is there. Child- 
ishness is a blot and a flaw, and shuts a man out of 
life's best things in every realm. No higher praise 
can be given to any man than to say that he is childlike. 
Hardly a severer thing can be said than that he is 
childish. Yet it can be said of most people, and the 
other — God forgive and help us ! — can be said of few. 

It is likeness to the child in the one admirable quality 
of childhood at its best, simplicity, — a trunk from 
which spring many beautiful branches. It is single- 
hearted. What would not one give for the child's 
power of disregarding all side issues in its absorbing 
pursuit of the one thing in view ! It is earnest, honest, 
sincere, straightforward, humble, teachable, believing, 
obedient, pure. There are men and women, not fools 
by any means, not children in mind nor in knowledge, 
in whose presence you do not wish to utter, you dare 

190 



CHILDLIKENESS OR CHILDISHNESS? 

not utter, your sophistry, your cynicism, your impurity, 
any more than in the presence of a little child. There 
is that in them which not only will not let the world's 
dust and dirt cling to them, but is an atmosphere that 
repels such things from their presence. 

The quality is consistent with the greatest learn- 
ing, the greatest profundity and subtlety of mind, 
and the greatest force of character. It is more, — it 
is indispensable to these things. It is not primarily 
a quality of the mind, but an attitude of the will and 
a flavor of the spirit, yet it brings to the mind liberty 
and insight nowhere else obtained. In the midst of 
the world's false ideas of manhood and life it de- 
mands the highest possible courage, but it finds its 
full reward in a peace that passeth all understanding 
and a power that cannot be measured. The lives 
that have touched humanity at, and to, its highest, 
have had it. They have been as deep as the ocean 
and as transparent as a tropic sea. The truest men 
of science, like Agassiz and Faraday; men of letters 
whose charm is greatest, like Goldsmith and Irving; 
the loftiest seers, like John; the greatest statesmen, 
like Lincoln and Gladstone, — have had it in unusual 
degree. 

It is trustful, loving, unselfish, fearless sonship in 
God's beautiful world of truth and force, and puts 
the soul into happy possession of the Father's wealth 
and the brother's heart. Its attitude toward man 
is described in the thirteenth chapter of First Cor- 
inthians, — it " seeketh not its own, is not easily pro- 
voked, thinketh no evil"; its attitude toward things 
is given in the sixth chapter of Matthew, — it " seeks 

191 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," for 
it knows that " your heavenly Father knoweth that 
ye have need of all these things "; its attitude toward 
God, in the fourteenth chapter of John's Gospel and 
the fourth chapter of his First Epistle, — " Ye believe in 
God, believe also in me," and " perfect love casteth 
out fear." 

Childishness is precisely the opposite, and mars 
everything, however beautiful, with which it mingles. 
It exhibits, not the child's singleness, but his nar- 
rowness; not his forgetfulness of self, but his forget- 
fulness of others; not his teachableness, but his un- 
teachable ignorance; not his absorption in the one 
great thing, but his proneness to mistake little things 
for the great things. It is petulant, irritable, self- 
seeking, proud, unreasoning. A child sings one song 
over and over till every ear but his own aches with 
the iterations; so does a man with a hobby or a 
grievance or a theory, — often, perhaps usually, a very 
little one. A child takes a bit of glass for a diamond, 
so does a man in his pursuit of money or office or 
popularity. A child insists on its own way simply 
because it is his own way; nine-tenths of the con- 
troversies of politics and science and " religion " are 
as reasonable in their matter and their motive. A 
child flings out of the circle of its playmates in a pet 
because its will is crossed; see Achilles on the beach 
shedding tears of rage, Juno nursing on Olympus her 
ungodlike wrath, Bismarck bewailing, — the endless 
procession of the " disgruntled." 

These men are often great of hand and arm and 
head, exuberant in riches and resource, with all the 

192 



CHILDLIKENESS OR CHILDISHNESS? 

equipments of greatness but one. They are colossi 
— in size; but they are colossal babies, — " children 
tossed about by every wind " of self and passion. 
The simple-hearted child of God has grown above 
all that. He may not know as much, but he knows 
more. He has learned to put heaven above earth, 
growth above gain, soul above sense, and love above 
everything. He has put away childish things. 
" When I was a child, I spake as a child, I under- 
stood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I 
became a man, I put away childish things.'' He 
has put on the best thing, the mature thing. " Now 
abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the great- 
est of these is love." He has reached highest rank 
in the kingdom of heaven. " Whosoever therefore 
shall humble himself as this little child, the same is 
greatest in the kingdom of heaven.' ' 



193 



XXXI 

WHEN THE OLDEST ARE THE 
YOUNGEST 

A QUAINT mystic of the latter day affirms that 
-* *• " the oldest angels are the youngest." The state- 
ment is beyond verifying at present, but it is an 
appealing paradox, even though there be no time in 
eternity. In some or all of the enviable qualities of 
youth those in the spirit-world who have lived the 
longest must surpass those who were summoned 
later into being. With them, time cannot bring de- 
crepitude or decay; it must bring something, and that 
something is growth. We on earth grow old. May 
not those in heaven grow young? 

What are some of these qualities which we may be- 
lieve expand with the passing aeons of an angel's 
life? 

As we grow old, the characteristic of youth that we 
most miss and regret is its abounding vigor. Labor 
adds vigor at first, but presently it loses its virtue, 
and we find that our bodies are machines in which 
the stored-up energy is limited. Check, guard, oil 
the clockwork as you will, the spring runs down at 
last. But in the spiritual realm exercise brings vigor 
without waste or decay; the heart grows strong by 
loving and the soul by trusting. The oldest angels 
have been exercising love, zeal, and purity for 

194 



WHEN OLDEST ARE YOUNGEST 

aeons longer than the youngest; they are aeons 
stronger. 

Interest and zest, fresh delight in the things he is 
doing, in the movement of the varied life about him, 
is another quality of youth that we would gladly re- 
tain. What would not the jaded man of the world 
give for that first fresh thrill? How some of us who 
are not all of the world worldly would delight if life 
had the savor it once had! But the longer the angel 
lives, the larger grows his outlook, the deeper his 
insight. He has been a diligent student of the mys- 
teries of God, " which things the angels desire to 
look into." The longer the divine forces are at work, 
the clearer their working appears; each new age adds 
to its interest and beauty. How his heart must leap 
as he reads more and more plainly the thoughts of 
God in the advancing drama of human life! It is 
only the blind who is bored. The seeing is thrilled 
with a growing fascination. 

Youth has again an interest and a pleasure in hu- 
manity at large, and in individual men and women, 
of which age and experience is too apt to deprive us. 
Our valuation of humanity becomes lower. We are 
more sure of human weakness, and less sure of human 
strength. But for all his experience of folly and sin, 
the older angel, with an insight surer, has had such 
experience of the saints of God that his life has been 
enriched beyond measure by the fidelity, the love, the 
unselfishness, the genuine values, he has found in 
human hearts. It must have done even an angel 
good to be acquainted with Isaiah and Paul and John, 
with Melancthon and Fenelon and Jonathan Edwards. 

195 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

The little girl clapped her hands when she heard that 
Phillips Brooks was dead. " How glad the angels 
must have been when they saw him coming ! " It is 
only a very young or a very unspiritual spirit who 
would say with Thomas Moore's peri : 

" * Poor race of men/ said the pitying spirit, 
' Dearly ye pray for your primal fall. 
Some flowerets of Eden ye still inherit, 
But the trail of the serpent is over them all/ " 

The oldest angel, on the contrary, holds his breath 
expectant in earth's foulest swamps; he looks to find 
at any moment one of heaven's choicest flowers bloom- 
ing there. Hope grows in him with every age. Each 
aeon has revealed to him another facet of the manifold 
wisdom and the steadfast purpose of God, each dec- 
ade exhibits more gloriously God's power to guide 
and uplift and glorify. 

Who has not envied youth's genial heart and uni- 
versal good-will? Each angel, no doubt, starts his 
spiritual life endowed with that. It is his in germ, 
undeepened, undeveloped. But as the ages pass, he 
has been steadily exercising it. He has been speed- 
ing on missions of mercy. He has been watching 
humanity with yearning desire for the growth of like 
good-will among men, he has been deep in the coun- 
sels of God, he has observed in Jesus Christ the 
flower and the fruit of God's timeless love, and the 
thrill has deepened in his heart until it dominates all 
others, — the thrill of that deathless love, good-will. 
The song the shepherds overheard was just a crumb 
from the heavenly feast, an echo of the unceasing 
song of heaven. 

196 



WHEN OLDEST ARE YOUNGEST 

And simplicity of mind and heart is a child's quality 
which man most sadly lacks and needs. Our heavenly 
inhabitant may have to spend some ages, first in 
grasping the multitude of facts and events before him, 
and then in bringing them together according to God's 
laws of being and significance. He may be confused 
at first by their multiplicity, and for a while the added 
details may mean still more confusion. By and by 
he has passed that point forever. Things have begun 
to tell their story to him, and each added fact is not 
so much more to cumber, it is so much more to illu- 
mine. Age by age the array falls into fewer lines. 
His wisdom is vaster, but his thought is simpler; his 
facts are more numerous, but his formulas grow less, 
and he sees increasingly that " through the ages one 
increasing purpose runs." 

All this sums itself up, for angel, or archangel, or 
seraph, in the child's absolute surrender of mind and 
will to its guide and ruler. They have discovered 
most clearly the infinite variety of their Master's wis- 
dom and power, and their own utter dependence in 
wisdom and strength. They have seen so often the 
marvels of his grace, his divine simplicity, his " ways 
past searching out," that " there is no breath in 
them." Adoring and expectant wonder, vastly deeper 
even than that of the " devout astronomer," becomes 
their habitual attitude. What next will he have to 
show to the principalities and powers? If death 
were for them, it would seem they would 

" Expire in their rapture and wonder 
As harpstrings are broken asunder 
By music they throb to express." 

197 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

Deathless, the throb of their wonder is transmuted 
into love and praise, and such unison with his will 
that they have but one wish, one longing, to be his 
instruments forever, voices to sound out his messages 
that God may be all and in all. 

" Which things are an allegory." He is the oldest 
Christian who has lived not longest but most in Christ. 
His also is the timeless life, in which years bring not 
decay but growth. Vigor, zest, hope, good-will, sim- 
plicity, surrender, which are youth's freshest beauties, 
are maturity's choicest fruits. The saint reaches his 
summit when he becomes a little child. The oldest 
Christians are the youngest. 



198 



XXXII 
THE MORNING AND EVENING HARP 

/ "T"\HE normal close of human life is not a climax, 
-*• but a cadence. Life's music begins in youth, 
like the nightingale in Tennyson's haunted valley, 
" with long and low preamble." It continues with 
increasing intensity and force through early man- 
hood up to the prime of life, its midday. Then it 
moves forward on a level or slightly declining plane, 
with perhaps somewhat increasing force for a while, a 
force whose springs, however, lie back in the pre- 
ceding stage, and whose activities take the directions 
determined then. Henceforth it slackens in intensity 
and movement, although not necessarily in depth or 
height, and by no means necessarily in beauty, for 
this is the season when " life takes a sober coloring 
from an eye that hath kept watch o'er man's mor- 
tality," and puts on ripe and tranquil graces impos- 
sible before. And then, " only waiting till the shad- 
ows are a little longer grown," the soul in quiet tar- 
ries for that season when cadences shall end, and the 
full-toned, ever deepening music of the eternal shall 
begin. 

It is a beautiful picture, a beautiful song. One 
would not have it otherwise. Let us not complain 
when some young life is stopped in midcurrent of 
advancing melody, for God knows how to choose 

199 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

and fit his heavenly choirs. Let us offer no criti- 
cism when he sees best, in the case of some strong 
servant of his, to substitute for the impending twilight 
of earth the glow of heaven's morning. We can 
see a grandeur in that sudden transfer to the larger 
sphere, great as was the place that was filled on earth. 
And yet we recognize the complete and tender beauty 
of this other song. The glory of the mellow sunset, 
so often almost indistinguishable, balances the glory 
of the eager morning. Each part, like Emerson's 
shell and seaweed, in its place is best. Each is as 
significant and as beautiful as the other. Think not 
that the slackening energies and soberer pulses are an 
evil thing; they are the sweet-toned echoes of past 
music, the pause before the heavenly symphonies. 
Shakespeare's " Seven Ages " are the worldling's pic- 
ture of the cycle of human life. One could wish that 
some poet of the deeper humanity, with Shakespeare's 
mighty mind and facile hand, but with a greater than 
his power of insight and comprehension, might tell 
the story as he sees it under the sky above us, in 
the light of the heaven beyond us. The lame and 
impotent conclusion of the " lean and slippered pan- 
taloon," " sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything," 
has no place beside this picture of the tranquil even- 
tide " when there shall be light." 

But for us the significance of the fact of the cadence 
lies in the relations of its different parts, in the truth 
that each note in the closing measures is the direct 
descendant of its predecessors, and they of theirs. 
The keynote was struck in youth, and while rude 
hands of sin too often play havoc later with the gra- 

200 



THE MORNING AND EVENING HARP 

cious melody thus begun, full, normal manhood is 
simply the louder, deeper vibration of the earlier 
chords, and old age carries on the same prevailing air 
and ruling motif. That last music, indeed, is not 
possible without the first. No doubt the heavenly 
Master can take the harp all unused to celestial tones, 
and with many a string destroyed, and call forth 
strains which shall make angels wonder and all heaven 
rejoice; but even he, we may reverently say, cannot 
evoke the music that might have sounded from its 
strings if through all the years they had grown 
wonted to the finer melodies. In each present note 
that sounds, all notes that have been are resounding, 
and if the higher music has been lacking in the past, 
the song, however sweet, lacks the richness it might 
have had. The tranquil march of age is moving to 
the measures it learned in manhood and in youth. 

And therefore the character of the earlier music, 
whether marked by adequacy, redundancy, or defect, 
molds all the later. The later simply expands and 
develops the earlier. This furnishes the central tone 
which has attracted to itself and ranged round it the 
kindred notes; this has been the dominating power 
which selected out of life's materials the congenial 
elements and transmuted them into its own likeness. 

To change the figure for a moment, it is not possible, 
from our human standpoint at least, to insert into the 
soul's warp and woof when the fabric is nearly woven, 
or even well-blocked out, the lacking threads of gold. 
Late-won polish soon wears off, late-won culture 
proves itself to be but superficial, late-won virtue has 
a hard struggle with long-seated passion, and the 

201 



THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT 

noble songs our minds have learned in maturer years 
are but evanescent; what remains are tunes which 
sank into the heart in youth, and those which vibrate 
in unison with them. Make what allowances we may 
for the transmuting power of development, allow that 
many of the things in youth that grate upon our 
nerves and offend our senses are but the acidity and 
the hardness of the apple incidental to its growth, 
look with confidence for time and sun and rain to 
mellow its crass juices into sweetness, consider that 
there must be a certain necessary shrillness and inco- 
herence in the tones of youth which only time and 
use can deepen and relate, allow for all external influ- 
ences that tend to heighten and enrich, nor forget the 
exceeding power of the grace of God, — yet the fact 
remains that in chief measure as the harp resounds in 
the morning, so shall it sing at night. 

In this lies the significance and the encouragement 
of all work for the young. It seems so disappoint- 
ing, so crass and crude and little, this drilling of 
high thoughts but feebly understood into thoughtless 
minds, this training of inept hands in movements 
which to them as yet " little meaning, little relevancy 
bear," this reiteration of noble sentiments to those who 
for long are silent to our singing, and, when the notes 
do begin to come, seem to utter them forth with but 
parrot iteration, — this seems, it is true, so trifling and 
so petty; but we are training earth's most glorious 
singers; we are striking the keynotes of a whole 
lifetime of music; we are molding and coloring man- 
hood's deep and thrilling tones; we are directing the 
rich, sweet music of the sunset hours; we are shap- 

202 



THE MORNING AND EVENING HARP 

ing the whole soaring, glorious, tender cadence of 
human life; we are preparing for the climax of 
eternity. 

Who at such a task could not be hopeful, patient, 
content? The notes are yet but shrill; and a hundred 
times we sound the right one only to hear the same 
false tone repeated; but when once the right tone is 
caught and woven by love and habit and the spirit of 
God into the very chords of life, its echoes shall be 
eternal. 



203 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER Pt-FSERVATION 
111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 

- 



